Found
by Aconitum-Napellus
Summary: During a turbulent evacuation of a human colony, Spock is taken hostage... Established K/S Rating: 18 for violence and implied non-consensual sex. Inspired by the picture 'Found' by K Laine k-laine . deviantart . com / art / Found-129830915
1. Chapter 1

1.

The cold rain was startling on the heat of Spock's skin as he cautiously left the woods and struck out into open farmland. Each droplet struck with an icy sting, and he gasped at the unaccustomed feeling before he could control his response. The wetness only grew as he crouched down in the rustling, storm-blown wheat, and thin, half-parched leaves clung to his chest and back like seaweed, the water acting as an itching, clinging magnet between his body and the foliage around him.

He crouched still for a moment, heaving air into his lungs, trying to steady his breathing after the adrenaline-fuelled dash from the farmhouse. The sun had been below the horizon for a few minutes now, and although its rays still illuminated the sky and dimly reflected on the ground, edges were blurred and movement distorted in the dying light. Here, he had the advantage. He could see much better than his human pursuers – and he could hear much better, too. He could hear their blundering attempts to trace him in the forest, but he had no doubt that they were deaf to his movement as he began to crawl through the wheat on hands and knees, trying to find a place where he could not be seen from the margins of the field.

He shivered as cold began to replace blood-flushed heat in his naked skin. He was grateful for the fact that he still had his warm, tough uniform trousers, but everything else had been taken from him in the farmhouse as a preliminary to – what?

Those events still disturbed him. He had not been overly surprised to be taken hostage as he had. These colonists had reason – they were to be ousted from their planet, from their home of two centuries. They had built an old-Earth idyll, with Earth architecture, and Earth crops and animals to continue their home away from home. The resistance to the evacuation had been furious, and as an obvious alien Spock had expected to attract a certain amount of hostility. But when they had pushed him to the floor at phaser point, and used scissors to rip away his tops, and pulled his boots and socks from his feet, he had begun to feel far more vulnerable. The light in the men's eyes had been unreadable, manic even. Their cause had maddened them.

It was the storm, and the men's adherence to Earth tradition in their homes, that had given Spock this one, precious chance. No amount of intelligence or skill could have replicated the sheer luck of a lightning strike hitting the old-style generating house and putting out the power. In the sudden darkness of a room with closed door and drawn curtains Spock had found himself at a distinct advantage. At that point his intelligence had paid off, and it had been the work of a moment to shake off the disoriented humans, wrap his fist in his own ruined shirt, and punch out the window behind him. He had thrown the useless garment to the ground the moment he had made it through the window, and run…

Now he found himself crawling across drought-hardened earth that stuck to hands and knees and bare feet as the sudden storm eased loose clots into mud. The drought itself, and the storm that was raging about him now, were the very reasons why these people were being relocated, and the drought and the storm were helping and hindering him in equal measure. The wind and the pelting of the rain masked his movements through the wheat. The dry, iron-hard earth masked any marks he might leave on the ground. But equally, the rain now pouring down his face and over his bare back and soaking through his trousers was blinding him, and slowing him and freezing him, and the drought-stricken wheat stalks were brittle, and instead of rebounding at each buffet of the wind were being flattened in swathes, shrinking the areas he could count on for cover. He could hear the humans making up ground – and worse than that, he could hear dogs…

And then twenty-third century technology cut through the primal mixture of mud, storm and fraying plants, and he felt the familiar warm vibration of a transporter beam catching each molecule in his body and separating it from the battering elements around him. Vision and sensation began to die as he was disassembled in the beam.

*Pagebreak*

Spock had expected the _Enterprise_.

The shock caught hold of him as the beam released him, crouched, half naked and soaked, on a utilitarian metal beaming pad in a dark, cavernous bay. He looked up cautiously, blinking water from his eyes, feeling the soil of the wheat field still on his palms and his bare feet – and as he raised his head it was caught by the brutal swing of an iron bar, and all discomfort and chill and surprise exploded into hot, quick pain, and then died in unconsciousness.

*Pagebreak*

'Where's Spock?' Kirk asked, the instant he noticed the absence of blue in the shirts of the men gathered around him. The fighting had been so intense for a few minutes that he had barely noticed anything at all, apart from the shouting, screaming, furious colonists that they were supposed to be peacefully evacuating. It was only as the _Enterprise_ crewmembers had regrouped after the fight had spilled down alleyways and behind buildings that he had realised that Spock was not among them.

'I don't know,' one of the security men said, looking about himself. 'I was off over there,' he said, pointing between two whitewashed buildings, 'and Mr Spock went in the other direction.'

'He wasn't with me,' put in another man, and the general consensus rippled through the group that no one had seen Spock for a good twenty minutes.

Coldness sank through Kirk's chest. This was supposed to be a peaceful evacuation, goddammit. _*This_* wasn't even the evacuation. This should have been a preliminary meeting, a quiet discussion between himself and the colony leaders to explain exactly why it was so necessary that they leave their home. He had taken the security team as a passive, visual representation of both the _Enterprise_'s power and their ability to help. He had ordered that the men not be armed, that they do nothing but speak peaceably to the colonists if approached. He had meant them as a suggestion of why it would be wise to leave the planet calmly and willingly, not as an outright, immediate threat.

Dammit, _*why_* hadn't he ordered them to bring phasers? he cursed internally. Even if they had just been the basic phasers, easily hidden in a pocket, or a palm… How could he have been so naïve to think that these people would take the eviction from their homes in a calm, and rational manner?

He noticed the rain now, streaking coldly from a sky that was suddenly grey and thunderous. The drought had lasted on this planet for ten months, and _*now_* it chose to rain. Small puffs of dust were being thrown into the air as each raindrop hit.

He almost got the urge to laugh.

*Pagebreak*

As the alien slumped to the floor of the transporter the men in the transporter room burst into anxious activity, surging forward and surrounding the limp, half-naked figure.

'You've killed him!' one man said in panic.

'Don't matter if I have, as long as we say he's alive,' the man holding the bar said dispassionately, poking the end of it hard into the alien's side. The inert skin went white, then flushed green as blood rushed back. 'But anyway – look – he's got blood-flow, he's breathing. Let's see what they sent us…'

The man rolled the limp body over with his boot, and a smile spread over his face.

'Well, look at that,' another man said, pushing closer to peer at the unconscious man. 'He ain't even human.'

'What is it?' the first one asked, stepping forward.

The man with the bar turned to his colleague, his smile still broad and satisfied.

'That, Jonas, is a Vulcan. One of those uppity bastards that think they run the Federation.' He kicked the unconscious form lightly with his boot. 'Well, Mr Logic. Let's see how far your brain and your reason take you here. This is a _*human_* world here, and you're not gonna take it from us.'

*Pagebreak*

Spock woke in darkness and silence, with nothing more than pain and uncomfortable sensation to guide him as to what had happened. His first awareness was the throbbing, pulsing pain in his cheek where the bar had struck him. He could taste blood in his mouth, and when he moved his jaw a minute amount he could feel a nauseating grating as of bone on bone. His jaw was fractured, then, and he had suffered some degree of concussion, although probably not to a serious degree. He had been unconscious long enough for the wetness to dry from his skin, but not for his trousers to dry entirely in this chill place. That spoke at least of hours, rather than days.

He ran his tongue painfully over his teeth, but could find no loose or dislodged ones in the areas of the fracture. That, at least, was reassuring. He turned his attention now to his more general condition. He was lying on his side, and the floor was hard and cold under his hip and flank. His knees were pulled up towards his chest, as if someone had tried to approximate the recovery position to prevent him choking on the blood in his mouth, or on unexpected vomit. But as his awareness grew he realised that his arms were cuffed uncomfortably behind his back. The wide metal of the cuffs was pushing unremittingly into his wrists, and his hands were numb.

He lay still for a moment, recalling the sight of the transporter in the brief moment before he had been rendered unconscious. The pad had been strewn with lumps of incomplete soil and wheat, and he had a distinct memory of some kind of rodent running from his field of vision. The signs were typical of a transporter that had not been designed for live transport, and of an operator who was equally unused to the task. Whoever had beamed him up, he had to be grateful for the fact that they had managed it with him intact.

He tried to sit up – and then decided against it as his head swam. It was entirely dark in this room, so even if he had sat there would be nothing to see, and he could not begin to explore the place with his hands bound and his equilibrium seriously compromised by the blow to the head. He had no choice but to lie and wait for some kind of enlightenment to be bestowed upon him.

He heard a slight mechanical movement above him, and as he turned his head towards the noise he recognised the one certainty in the room. There was a tiny, slow blinking light high above him, too dim to light anything around it, and too blurred in his vision to make out with any clarity. That light, he was certain, was associated with a camera, and that movement that had only begun at his first attempt to sit meant that he was being watched.

So be it. There was nothing he could do. He closed his eyes again, and rested his head back to the ground. The only thing that could profit him now was rest. Anything else, he would have to trust to the mercy of his captors.

*Pagebreak*

A light flickered on, and Spock blinked, wincing as his eyes adjusted. His head was pounding with crippling pain, and his vision was still somewhat blurred. From the feeling in his skull he suspected he had been struck more than once on the transporter, to ensure his unconsciousness. He could certainly feel dried fluid through the eyelashes of his right eye, and down across the bridge of his nose, and by concentrating he could see the green colour of the stain. Presumably blood had flowed from the second wound at his temple and dried across his face.

There was a metal bowl on the floor in front of him, deliberately put close to his face, and as he gazed at it he realised that it was half-full of water. Someone, then, had again put some thought to his survival, despite his harsh treatment. They wanted him alive – that much was obvious. Drinking from a bowl with one's hands tied behind one's back was not likely to be dignified, but it would allow him to imbibe vital liquid.

A door scraped open. He turned his head stiffly towards the noise of footsteps, and saw more than one person coming towards him across what was obviously a relatively large room. Their dark trousers and boots were still blurred to his sight. He blinked again, looking upward as they reached him, and faces slowly swam into focus. They were apparently all human, and by their clothing he judged that they all belonged to the colony that he had been sent to evacuate.

'Well, it's awake,' one of the men said.

Spock regarded him, unwilling to speak unless it was necessary with the pain in his jaw. He had a sense, more mental than visual, that this was the man who had caused the injury. His jagged, aggressive personality had felt very strong to Spock's mind as the bar had come down towards his face. He closed his eyes briefly as the memory of that moment played itself in his mind with agonising slowness. He pushed the thought away with an effort. At times an eidetic memory was more of a curse than a blessing.

He opened his eyes again to see another man bending closer to him, with more concern on his face than aggression.

'I don't know, Piper,' he said in a low voice. 'He doesn't look right. You shouldn't've hit him that hard…'

Piper laughed harshly. 'I hit him just hard enough to suit. Isn't that right, Vulcan?' he asked. At Spock's continued silence he raised his boot and held it poised, aimed precisely at the dark, agonised bruise on Spock's face.

'I am not dangerously injured,' Spock said quickly. The pain involved in talking was far less than the pain that would evidently result from _*not_* talking.

'There you are, Jonas,' Piper said in satisfaction, looking to the other man. 'You should take care. Treat him with too much softness and he'll use it for his own gain. These lot are devious devils.'

Spock suppressed the urge to raise his eyebrow at that comment. He could not imagine that his very real desire to remove himself from this situation could be classed as devious. If he read this man correctly, however, it would be best to do absolutely nothing to antagonise him, which is why he continued to lie very still on the floor, refraining from any movement, even facial, that may prompt violence.

'All right, get up,' Piper said after a moment of silence.

Spock regarded him emotionlessly.

'I will require assistance,' he said in a level voice.

'_*Get up,_*' Piper repeated in a dangerous tone.

Spock closed his eyes briefly, then began to roll awkwardly onto his front, attempting to push himself up onto his knees without the use of his hands. He wavered, his head swimming at the movement.

'I need assistance,' he repeated in a more humble tone. 'Please. I am suffering the effects of concussion.'

There was a moment of tense silence, then the man named Jonas reached down and put a hand under his arm, lending considerable strength to his attempt to stand. Spock wavered as he gained his feet, and Jonas's fingers dug into his arm to steady him.

'You'd better bring that water,' Jonas said to Piper, rather uncertainly. At Piper's look of disgust he said, 'Well, he'll need it. We can't let him die of thirst. We've all had a taste of that through the drought.'

Piper picked up the bowl with some reluctance, then said impatiently, 'Come on, then.'

Spock unsteadily followed the tug of Jonas's hand, trying to suppress nausea and dizziness so that he could properly take in his surroundings. His efforts were of little use – there were signs on the walls, but his vision was too blurred to read them, and the corridors he was taken through were lit only dimly. His impression was of a large, poorly maintained vessel that echoed with every footstep, but he could gain little more information than that. He was taken into a lift, and transported up or down a number of levels, and then led into yet more dark, neglected corridors. His final destination was a relatively small storeroom where boxes were lashed firmly to the floor with metal ties. He understood the purpose of this decision when he was ordered to kneel down on the floor, and the cuffs that bound his wrists behind him were attached by a short chain to one of the staples in the floor.

Without a word to him, Piper and Jonas began to clear out the boxes from the room, until he was left in an area that seemed bigger than it had, but ten times more bleak. This room had the same slow-blinking security camera in the corner that the other had had. The walls were a dim, dirty grey, and the floor was filthy with footprints and dried splashes of liquid and dust. The only relief on the flat, featureless walls and floor were the staples for lashing containers in place, but now that his wrists were attached to one of them they had an altogether more ominous air.

Piper put the water bowl down near him, slopping half of the contents carelessly on the floor as he did. Then, without another word of explanation, the pair left the room, and the light blinked off.

Left in darkness again, Spock allowed himself to slump a little. It was even colder in this room, and he felt exhausted. His only companion was a low hum, as of engines, vibrating through the floor into his knees and bare feet. Logic was trying to assert itself in his mind, but it was being crowded out by uncertainty and pain and tiredness. The water bowl did speak of a concern to keep him alive – but he suspected that concern belonged to Jonas alone. He could not be certain that the wrong movement or words, or the wrong decision from Starfleet if any ransom attempt was made, would not lead to the man called Piper unceremoniously ending his life – and he very much desired that his last moments of life would not be here, chained in a cold, dark room, experiencing blunt, deadly violence.

Logically, all he could do was to endure until someone decided to come to him again, and then try to reason with them – but he sensed that reason would be of little use with these men. How did one use logic against complete irrationality? His fate was entirely in the hands of his captors, and his colleagues who, he hoped, would be putting great effort into the attempt to find him.

He found himself wavering in his kneeling position, and wondering briefly if he was permitted to move. He could not recall them ordering anything. He could not recall them saying a word to him since telling him to kneel – but his concentration was blurred and spoilt by the pounding in his head. He exhaled slowly. He could not permit these people to control his responses even when they were not in the room. True, there was a camera watching him, but they could not expect him to kneel here, motionless, until someone returned.

He mentally castigated himself for allowing fear to creep in to his motivations. He needed rest. That was all there was to it. There was just enough give in the chain, at least, to allow him to move a little, and he clumsily tried to lie down again, finally toppling over onto the hard floor with a dull thud. Sleep, at least, would pass the time and help to restore his injured skull and bruised brain. He let his head rest onto the ground, and began to go through the process of a meditative exercise that would help him to gain sleep despite his discomfort.

*Pagebreak*

More than twenty-four hours passed before his next visit. By this time he had recovered to an extent from the vicious blow to the head, and his thinking was far clearer, but boredom, hunger, uncertainty and pain were the only things to occupy his thoughts. He had managed, once, to find the water bowl in the dark and lap from it thirstily, but in doing so he had spilt the rest of the water over the floor, so he was almost grateful when a new person entered the room. The man wordlessly righted the bowl and poured more water into it, and Spock caught the scent of food as he bent. He watched the man, his stomach clenching on its emptiness, trying not to appear eager. The man took something out of the metal bucket he carried, and then put the pail down on the floor and unlocked the chain at Spock's wrists without a word.

Spock's eyes drifted to the bag he now saw in the man's hands, and his jailer smiled.

'You'll get fed, Vulcan,' he said. 'But first you can take advantage of your luxury bathroom facilities. Get up,' he said, pulling the Vulcan unceremoniously to his feet, and then unbuttoning his trousers, and roughly slipping them down to his knees, along with his underwear.

Spock closed his eyes briefly at this new indignity, then cast a reluctant look at the bucket.

'You'd better use it,' the man said, his eyes drifting deliberately to the Vulcan's exposed body, and then flicking away again. 'You might not get another chance for a while. No one's eager for this job.'

'My hands,' Spock tried, without much hope of a positive response.

'Oh, no,' the man smiled. 'You don't need your hands for that. I know what things you Vulcans can do with your hands. You won't find a man in here who's got keys to those cuffs.'

Spock exhaled, then settled himself down awkwardly over the bucket. It was obvious that even his most intimate bodily functions were subject to the whims of his captors, and he could do nothing about it but submit. The man watched him for a moment, then, apparently repelled, wandered over to the other side of the room and stood there, watching the camera in the corner with disinterest.

'I have finished,' Spock said finally, in a subdued tone.

'Thank god,' the man muttered, casting him a disgusted look.

He hauled the Vulcan back to his feet, pulled up and refastened his clothing, then put the bucket over by the door, and ordered Spock to kneel again.

'Right,' he said, as he fixed the chain back to the staple in the floor. He upended the food bag near to the water bowl, and a handful of bread and vegetable scraps fell to the floor.

'Light'll stay on for five minutes,' he said. 'Make use of the time.'

Spock watched him without speaking as the man picked up the bag and the bucket and left the room. He stayed kneeling for a second longer, then resumed his former awkward position lying on the floor, and began the undignified and painful attempt to eat the food that had been left for him in the dust and dirt.

*Pagebreak*

It was three interminable days before the _Enterprise_ was favoured with any contact from Spock's captors. Three days of frantic scanning and searching and questioning of the human population on the planet below had resulted in nothing but dead ends and denials of involvement. Kirk had barely slept in that time – but there was only so much that one frantic human could do in the face of a vast, mute planet that did not want give up its secrets.

When finally a call came through Jim was sitting in his quarters, his head resting on his arms as his exhausted brain tried to conceive of a new way to cajole or threaten some kind of information from the men who had abducted his first officer.

'Briefing room,' he said incoherently to Uhura as she relayed the request for an interview, then said more clearly, 'Call Dr McCoy to Briefing Room 6, Uhura. I'll take the call there. I want you there too. Do what you can to trace it.'

'Yes, sir,' she said smoothly, with understanding of his exhaustion deep in her voice.

Kirk cut the communication, tried to rub some of the tiredness away from his face with clenched fists, and left for the briefing room.

*Pagebreak*

The picture that flickered onto the screen was obviously a video image, but Spock was neither moving nor speaking. He knelt motionless on the floor in a grey-walled room, his dark eyes focussed unwaveringly on a point just to the right of the camera and his arms held rigidly behind his back. An ugly bruise disfigured the right side of his face, spreading from jaw to temple, but his breath was steady and calm and his face composed. He had obviously been treated with some violence, but he showed no sign of noticing the cuts and bruises on his naked torso, any more than he did the swollen injury to his face.

'Since our guest refuses to make a plea, I will do it for him,' said a brittle voice from behind the camera.

The viewpoint moved shakily around the Vulcan, focussing more closely on the bruises on his body, and marks on his back that looked very much like boot prints. His arms were evidently joined at the wrists with cuffs.

'We have no problem with inflicting pain on the Vulcan,' the voice continued as the camera returned to view Spock face-on. 'It's quite fun seeing how much he can take. I can promise you, we have found out just how far we need to stretch him before he squeals.'

Spock's cheek muscle flinched minutely at those words, and Kirk started forward at the terminal with a low growl, before remembering that there was absolutely no use in lunging at a message on a screen.

'We want this unwarranted evacuation to cease,' the voice said in a rougher tone. 'We have scientific evidence that the alteration in orbit causing these weather patterns can be easily righted with tractor beams, if only the Federation was willing to put themselves to the trouble.'

At this Spock's eyebrow rose by a tiny degree, and his lips tightened momentarily, and the man's voice behind the camera sudden became less controlled.

'You disagree, Vulcan?' he asked heatedly.

Spock's lips parted stiffly, but he was not given the chance to speak. The view on the screen suddenly became blurred as the camera swung around, focussing on nothing, and there was the sharp sound of a fist hitting flesh, and a grunt that was very obviously Spock's. When the camera steadied again the Vulcan was bent over slightly, his tied arms straining, and his breath coming with difficulty as he attempted to recover from the blow to his abdomen. As he straightened up very slowly, he looked into the camera and said his first words in a voice slurred with pain.

'I am all right, Jim. I require no rescue.'

Another moment of alarm flickered in the dark eyes, prompted by some movement from the man in the room with him – but no violence came of it.

'It would be very easy to kill this – creature,' the anonymous voice said steadily from behind the camera. 'It would be just as easy to return him to you, if we get what we want. The condition he's in when you get him back depends on how long you take to make your decision.'

The transmission froze, and Uhura said softly, 'It was cut from their end, sir.'

Kirk stared at her for a moment, as if he had forgotten she was in the room. Then he shook his head as she reached out a finger toward the screen and said, 'Leave it, Lieutenant. Will you be able to trace it?'

'I've got all the data I can,' she said in her low, velvet voice. 'If I can take it up to the bridge, I'll do everything I can with it.'

Kirk nodded, then said briefly, 'Good, Lieutenant. You're dismissed.'

She gave him a brief, sympathetic look, and then left the room without a word. The captain's relationship with his first officer was common knowledge throughout the ship by now, and everyone knew that Kirk was not just worrying about a competent officer and friend.

'We have to find him, Bones,' Kirk said in a low voice, the instant they were alone in the room.

'You don't have to tell _*me_* that, Jim,' McCoy said seriously.

Kirk's eyes were fixed on the frozen image of Spock on the screen, as if he could somehow connect with him through that image, despite the fact that with every second it became more and more divorced from whatever was happening to the Vulcan at that moment.

'I should be able to _*find_* him, Bones,' he said desperately. 'I can _*feel_* him. I can feel him out there. I know he's hurt, and afraid, and – all those things he'd never admit to. *_But I don't know where he is_…*'

'We will _*find_* him,' McCoy said seriously. 'Uhura's working on tracing that signal right now. She's the best person you could ever dream of to have doing something like that. And once we've got that zeroed in, we're half way there.'

'Do you think they've really gone far enough to make him cry out?' Kirk asked, his face pale with worry and anger. For any human the idea of making noise under punishment was quite accepted, but for Spock it was unthinkable, except under extreme pain.

'Don't torture yourself, Jim,' McCoy said firmly, looking almost as worried about his captain as he was about Spock.

'*_They're* _torturing _*him_*,' Kirk said angrily.

'And you need to keep your head, if you want to get him out of there,' McCoy said firmly.

'I know,' Kirk said, rubbing a hand over his face. He gave a wan smile. 'I should be the one telling _*you_* all this, I know. I'm not being much of a captain at the moment.'

'Jim,' McCoy said softly, putting his hand on Kirk's arm. 'If I ever saw a person who can completely hold it together when their partner is in a situation like this, then I'd either be seriously doubting their relationship, or sending them for psychological review. You have got over four hundred good officers at your disposal. _*Use_* them.'

'Use them,' Kirk muttered, then looked up. 'All right. I'll use you first. What can you tell me about how they're treating him, Bones?'

McCoy peered close at the image on the screen, focussing in on the Vulcan's face.

'I don't think they're treating his injuries at all,' he said. 'And by the look of the filth on his cheeks and around his mouth I'd say they're not releasing his hands for him to eat – they're letting him eat off the floor, or something. Bruises at various stages of healing. I'd say he gets a good going over every few days, at least. He was squinting a little in the light, as well – which either means the light's painful to his eyes, or he's being kept in the dark. Perhaps both. And he's nervous. He's very wary of his captors.'

Kirk nodded, bound in misery, very well aware that McCoy had kept back from mentioning any specifics of inflicted pain he had gleaned from the injuries on Spock's body.

'He's got good reason to be wary of them,' he muttered. 'Do you think – ' He looked up at McCoy, an appeal in his hazel eyes. 'Do you think his life's in danger?'

McCoy exhaled a long-held breath, and shook his head.

'I – wish I could tell you, Jim, but I'm no criminal psychologist. I don't think he's in immediate danger from his current injuries. But – those people are volatile. That much was clear from that transmission. Like I said, Spock's very cautious. He's got the sense not to antagonise them. But – he is helpless. I can't say more than that.'

Kirk clenched his fingernails hard into his palms, staring at the image on the screen again. Spock was rigid, and he was pale, and alarm was clear in his eyes. He was half-naked and cold and injured, and absolutely incapable of defending himself with anything other than words. He had to be _*found,_* and he had to be found soon.

'All right,' he said decisively. 'I want every inch of that colony scanned, and I want every anomaly checked out, and every scrap of evidence logged and examined. We are going to _*find_* him, even if I have to tear that colony apart with my fingernails – and when I do find him – '

He trailed off, but it was obvious by the glittering light in his eyes that when he laid hands on Spock's captors and abusers, they would wish that they had never even heard of Vulcans or the starship _Enterprise_, or of its very determined human captain_._


	2. Chapter 2

2.

Spock lay on the floor in his dark cell, and thought of Jim. He thought of Jim's human-cool hands stroking the heat out of the wounds on his face, and easing the pain in his newly shattered right arm, and massaging blood and life back into his numb and freezing fingers. He thought of the touch of Jim's mouth on his, and the reassurance of that warm, welcoming mind reaching out to him, and the security of his arms about Spock's body, holding him against all the real and unreal fears in the world. He thought of Jim's soft fingers gently loosening his clothing, and slipping it away from his body, and of his lips coming down to –

No. He would not think of that.

Muscles tightened through his body, and he was suddenly and fully aware of the cold and the pain and the enveloping uncertainty again. He could smell the water bowl near his face, and festering scraps of food on the floor. He had been reduced to an animal, scenting his feed in the dark and reaching for it with clumsy groping of lips and tongue, existing only as a body of flesh and blood that lay here waiting for his owners' whim to inflict pain or privilege as the mood took them. This time he had been alone for five days, lying on his side in the darkness, nuzzling for the leftover scraps of his last feeding and lapping at increasingly stale water. But he had, at least, been alone… Alone, they inflicted no pain or extra indignity on him. His only indignities came through neglect, but no one could see them, at least.

He closed his eyes. He would not think of the last visit. He _*would not think of it._* It had never happened…

Misery crushed him again despite every effort at logic and rationality. It was hard to cling to logic with no company but his own treacherous mind. Without anyone to witness his stoicism and impassivity, stoicism deserted him, and for once he let utter despair drench through his body and pin him to the floor.

Then the door opened and the light flickered on as multiple feet trooped into the room, and he closed his eyes, resigning himself to what would come next…

*Pagebreak*

Feet again… Feet. He had grown to hate the sound of feet, as much as his controls would allow him the full force of hate. No one came down here but to visit him, and no one came to visit him but to harm him or taunt him or to leave the food and water that kept him conscious and alert to feel pain and humiliation.

He began, painfully, to pull himself up onto his knees. Recently they had been punishing him for his lack of reaction when they entered the room. He must present himself, upright, neat, and contrite – and it was worth obeying those strictures just to delay or diminish the blows that he knew must come.

But the sound of feet faded away again, and disappeared, and he held himself uncertainly, waiting to see what might happen. It was unprecedented for the sound of feet not to be followed by the flicker of the light and the opening of the door. Were they trying to trick him? Were they waiting for him to resume his position on the floor, just so that they could punish him for not being upright?

The feet moved closer, moved away again, and he bit his lip into his mouth in frustration and trepidation. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, and he had not dared to let himself lie back on the floor. There was no noise…

And then, again, they were back, and the light flickered on, and Spock closed his eyes briefly in resignation as the latch clicked – and opened them to see –

Jim!

Relief coursed through him, his heart momentarily thumping in his side before he regained control, a flood of warmth pushing away his awareness of everything but this beacon of hope that was moving towards him…

The captain slipped through the door with the wary stance of a hunting animal, his eyes darting about the small room and almost immediately lighting on the Vulcan, pale and wavering on his knees, his eyes wide with unrepressed astonishment. He glanced at the room around him only long enough to be sure that Spock was quite alone, before letting his focus narrow down onto that one precious being that he had despaired of finding alive, if he found him at all.

He moved towards him in swift silence, almost unable to believe that _*finally,_* after a search of room after room after room, he had _*found_* the Vulcan behind this unassuming door that he had almost overlooked because it fitted so seamlessly into the dark corridor wall. Spock was staring at him with the same mute disbelief, as if he had ceased to believe that Jim or the _Enterprise_ or light or hope or any good thing existed in the universe.

Jim knew he looked like he had crawled through hell to get here – but Spock looked like he had been living in hell for a long time. Jim would have kissed him, but it was obvious that Spock's lips were bruised and painful. There was a dry trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth, and his cheek was flushed with the remnants of the injury Kirk had last seen in that communication from the hostage takers. In lieu of the kiss he desperately wanted to place on those lips he laid his forehead against Spock's forehead, and simply knelt there for a moment, eyes closed, as the relief and fear and anger and love swirled and settled in his mind.

After a long moment he rested back on his heels and regarded the Vulcan. He was thin after four weeks of captivity, and his body had obviously been put through a toll of pain and neglect. His naked torso and arms were scattered with welts and bruises. He had been beaten at some point, and the severe green marks were still clear on his back. His wrists, chained to the floor behind his back, were abraded by a month's rubbing on hard metal. He had been stripped of all clothing but his trousers, and his skin was pallid with cold.

'What did they do to you?' Kirk whispered, reaching out a hand to the Vulcan's cheek.

'Enough,' Spock said grimly. His obsidian eyes gave away nothing but an idea of repressed trauma.

Kirk traced his hand over the contours of the Vulcan's face. 'My love…'

Spock flinched, and his eyes became a shade more veiled.

'Spock,' Kirk urged, dropping his hand to his side. 'What did they do?'

Spock shook his head, then looked up, allowing a glimmer of life into his eyes as they connected with Kirk's.

'Please, Jim. Would you release my hands?'

His voice was thickened by the damage to his lips and jaw, and it was obvious that just talking was painful.

'Oh – god,' Kirk murmured. He couldn't believe he had sat there all this time *_without*_ releasing him. He had been so caught up with the blessed wonder that Spock was alive and intact that he had not thought of anything else.

He examined the metal cuffs briefly, then set his phaser down to the narrowest of beams.

'Hold perfectly still,' he warned the Vulcan, and he carefully aimed the beam first at the link holding the cuffs together, and then at the chain that attached them to the floor. Spock moved forward as the beam ceased as if a rubber band had been released, bringing his arms stiffly round to the front and flexing them slowly before folding them protectively across his chest.

'The cuffs themselves will have to wait until we're on the ship,' Kirk said. 'But – I guess it must feel good just to be able to move your arms?'

Spock's eyebrow raised briefly, and then he nodded. He moved fingers slowly over the metal about one wrist, feeling the curious sensation of it as his numb fingers came back to life for the first time in days. He could feel nothing but the immovable solidity of it at first, and then the slight roughness in the surface, and then the temperature as his fingers began to tingle mercilessly with blood flow.

'Come on,' Jim was saying, with a growing urgency in his voice. 'You need to get on your feet, Spock. We have to get out of here.'

'Are the ship's shields raised?' Spock asked, looking about himself briefly.

'The ship's?' Kirk repeated, and then, realising the Vulcan's mistake, said, 'Spock, you're not on a ship. You never were. This is the storage depot in Oakdale. You're less than a hundred miles from where you went missing!'

Spock blinked at that news. After the transporter had taken him, he had never had any doubt that he was on a ship. What he had taken for the noise of engines must have been generators, or some other equipment.

'That doesn't matter now,' Kirk said quickly. 'We have to get out of here, and it's a long way to the exit. I can't use my communicator down here.'

'Underground,' Spock murmured in a wondering voice, as every factor of his imprisonment here came together in his mind.

He knew that the storage facility in Oakdale was mostly underground, to hide the ugly modernity of the building – and neither the transporter nor communicators would work on these lower levels, where the mineral makeup of the rocks above baffled the technology. Scans would not have found him, and every search would have had to be made with no more assistance than human eyes and human ears. No wonder he had spent a month without being found…

'Spock, come on,' Kirk urged him, putting a hand under his arm. 'We need to go!'

Spock began slowly to raise himself up. His feet were numb too, his legs weak from immobility, and at his first effort he collapsed back onto the floor. He heard a coughing noise from Kirk, and looked up sharply. Moving had stirred up the stale scent of urine that lingered in his clothes. Attention from his captors had been sporadic in this dark, remote cell, and it had not always been possible to wait for toilet visits that sometimes came days apart.

He dropped his head, ashamed, despite all the logic he could bring to bear on his situation.

'Come on,' Jim said again, saying nothing about the smell. He put his hand under Spock's arm again, helping him to stand. 'You can walk?' he asked, slipping his arm firmly about Spock's back to support him, although he winced at putting pressure on the welts that ran down from his shoulders to below the waist of his trousers.

'I must,' Spock murmured.

'Come on, then. I stunned everyone I saw, but I can't be certain if it's clear…'

Spock stumbled after him. If he had let himself, he would have been overwhelmed with a weakness born of lack of food and care and exercise, and by the pain that throbbed in every part of him – but blessed Vulcan control clamped down over the biological insistence of his body, and allowed him to move, one foot after another, following Jim with wordless faith. He noticed the corridors no more this time than he had on his way into this dark, chilled warren. Jim apparently knew where he was going, and all he needed to do was follow. He took in the occasional slumped figure on the floor, and recognised the occasional face with an odd emotion that he could not define, but those unconscious men did not matter any more. Only a few more steps, Jim kept telling him, and they would be safe…

The blazing heat outside was astonishing on his skin, and he stood momentarily dumbstruck, and blinded by the light, as the heat of the sun sank into flesh that had been cold for so long. But that heat lasted only for a few seconds. Jim was speaking into his communicator, and a moment later they were dissolving, and materialising on the ship. Spock straightened, looking about himself and attempting to pull himself back to a semblance of dignity. He was on the ship… He was where he belonged, where he was safe, and in control, and where there was an entire sickbay waiting to remove the pain that he was in. Why, then, did he want so much to take himself off to a dark corner of his own rooms and huddle there alone until his pain eased of its own accord?

He exhaled a shaky breath. Personal desire was of no more relevance in this situation than it was while he had been held captive. His duty was to be healed, and return to duty, and it was what he *_must_* do.

The transporter room door opened with a hiss, and Spock turned toward it in a reaction that was just a little too fast and uncontrolled. He could feel Jim watching him, his concern burrowing into him and trying to soothe his mind, and he turned to him, ignoring the entry of Dr McCoy to the room to reassure his partner that he was all right. Jim smiled, a smile he reserved only for Spock, and he felt himself relax a little.

'All right, Spock, sickbay,' McCoy cut in.

Spock turned toward him. He felt dazed. He suddenly became aware of how dirty and ill-clad he was, with his dirt-encrusted face and traces of dried blood on his skin, his bare feet and filthy, odorous trousers.

He turned his eyes on the gurney, and began to protest, 'I do not need – '

'Yes, you do,' McCoy said firmly.

Spock found that he did not have the strength to resist as the doctor's hands pressured him onto the mattress. Even as he lay the doctor was managing to simultaneously scan him, cover him with a blanket, and give orders.

'Get Scotty up to sickbay to get those cuffs off him,' he barked. 'And I want the fracture kit and dermal regenerators ready for me. All right, Spock,' he said, for that moment his voice more gentle and entirely focussed on the Vulcan. Then his attention turned briefly away again. 'Jim, you coming?'

Spock's eyes travelled to Jim, and saw him nod, his lips pressed together in a tight line. He accepted his situation, and closed his eyes as the gurney began to rumble over the carpeted floor, ceiling lights flashing through his eyelids as he moved under them. Home. He was home, and he had nothing to do now but lie still and let McCoy do his job.

*Pagebreak*

As the moment came for Spock to transfer from the gurney to the examination table the tension in the sickbay was palpable. McCoy's gaze slipped from the Vulcan to Kirk, and back again, trying to work out exactly where the problem lay. While Engineer Scott had busied himself removing the cuffs from Spock's wrists there had been little awkwardness – but then he had left, and McCoy had raised the point that to treat Spock he would have to get out of his current clothing, and a veil had seemed to lower over the Vulcan's eyes.

'Spock, would you rather be alone for the examination?' he asked quietly, trying not to notice the injured look that Jim shot him at the question.

Spock's lips parted, and he glanced at Kirk, apology clear in his eyes. Then after a moment he nodded, and said in an almost inaudible voice, 'Yes, Doctor, I would rather be alone.'

Kirk inhaled deeply, then reached out to touch Spock's arm with the briefest but most telling of gentle strokes, and said, 'I understand. I'll go sort out the fallout from this rescue operation. Call me, Bones, won't you?'

'I – am sorry, Jim,' Spock said, as if Jim's understanding had been worse than protests or argument, and McCoy turned to busy himself with something as Kirk reached out to gently cup his hands either side of the Vulcan's face, and lightly touch his lips to his cheek.

'Don't worry,' he said in a low murmur, trusting to the exchange of feeling that travelled through the touch more than to what he was saying. 'I understand. You've been through hell. I'll be here as soon as you need me.'

Spock nodded in grateful acknowledgement, and watched the human unwaveringly as he left the room. As the door closed he turned back to McCoy, and said in a falsely stable tone, 'Now, Doctor.'

'Now,' the doctor echoed, with carefully concealed concern. 'Let's get you changed and cleaned up.'

McCoy said nothing about the stiff, pungent state of Spock's trousers and underwear. He was more concerned with helping him to unobtrusively to remove the clothing considering the damage that was obvious to his right arm. The limb was darkly bruised, and to his professional eye it was also subtly twisted where a break had been forced to heal in the position held by the cuffs.

'Your arms were behind your back,' he said, looking at the arm critically, and Spock nodded silently.

'I'm going to have to rebreak that, and set it,' he warned the Vulcan. 'See the curvature of the upper arm?'

Spock nodded again. He had been very aware that the arm was broken, and very aware of its unnatural position as it began to heal.

'First order is to get you clean,' the doctor continued, aware of the Vulcan's unusual quietness, but deciding not to make an issue of it. 'I guess you'd rather take a shower than have someone else do it for you.'

'Yes, thank you, Doctor,' Spock said in a subdued tone.

McCoy went with him to the shower, waiting outside while the Vulcan washed. After little over ten minutes he came out wrapped in a towel that must have been the softest thing to touch him in a month. Just the simple act of washing himself clean seemed to have revived Spock a little, but he still appeared abnormally withdrawn.

'Come on,' McCoy said kindly, nodding toward the examination room again. 'I'll get some topical painkiller on your jaw and your ribs, and give the breaks a boost with the bone knitter. The arm will have to wait for an operation, but I can at least kill the pain and give it some support for now.'

'Thank you, Doctor,' Spock said again, his eyes focussed on the examination table rather than the doctor's face.

'Apart from the breaks it's mostly cuts and bruising,' McCoy continued, helping Spock onto the table. 'But I'll give you a deep body scan to rule out internal injuries. Is there anything you need to tell me about what happened to you down there?'

Spock blinked. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling now. For a moment he seemed unsure what to say.

'I was knocked unconscious when I arrived at the storage facility,' he said finally, in a flat, expressionless tone. 'My jaw was broken then, and I surmise I suffered mild concussion at that point. The arm was broken – eleven days ago, I believe.'

'Okay,' McCoy nodded, moving his scanner towards the Vulcan's head. 'I'll take a detailed look at your brain and check how you're healing. Anything else? The malnutrition's obvious – you must have lost a good ten pounds in weight. Anything less visible?'

Spock shook his head stiffly.

'I have faith in your skills, Doctor,' he said in a low voice.

'And you don't want to talk about it,' the doctor nodded.

Spock pressed his lips together, and then exhaled a breath from deep down in his lungs.

'I want – to be left alone,' he said honestly. 'I require your skills to heal the body. My mind is my own concern.'

'All right,' McCoy nodded slowly.

Usually such a statement would have drawn a barbed response, but it was obvious that the Vulcan was struggling with some deep trauma, and the doctor's best course of action for now was to do as Spock wished – to heal as much of the body as possible, so that Spock could concentrate on problems within his own mind.

'Just lie still,' he murmured, setting up the deep scanner above the bed. 'This should take about five minutes, Spock. You don't have to stay absolutely immobile, but it helps not to move too much.'

'Of course,' Spock said.

The only things that moved were his lips, and it remained that way as the probing beam moved millimetre by millimetre down his body. McCoy analysed the results of the scan as they were fed into his computer, registering the remnants of the concussion, the deep-tissue bruising, and the hairline fractures still evident in the ribs. The muscle-wasting and malnutrition were highlighted, along with a certain degree of dehydration, and low levels of vitamin D due to lack of light. The scan moved lower still, and the doctor stiffened as he saw exactly why Spock was quite so traumatised by his time in captivity.

He held in the curses that he desperately wanted to utter, and continued to watch the scan results with a stoicism worthy of his Vulcan patient. Spock did not want to speak about it. That much was blatantly obvious, and he knew from long experience that there were some times when it was best to simply yield to the Vulcan's wishes, and wait for him to reach a point where he felt he could speak.

He snatched a sidelong glance at the Vulcan. Spock was staring at the ceiling still, absolutely motionless, his gaze inscrutable to interpretation. He had no doubt that if the Vulcan was ordered back to duty tomorrow he would go, and present very little sign to the outside world of his suffering apart from a tendency to silence – but every moment he spent alone would be a moment of torturing himself as he tried to reconcile the logic and the emotion of what he had been through. Thank God for Jim, was all that he could think. Without Jim, Spock would have no one to unburden himself to. It would take time, he was sure, for the Vulcan even to speak of what had happened to his dear captain, but he would, eventually, speak, and the relief he would gain was inestimable.

'All right,' he murmured eventually, pulling the scanner away from the table. 'You've recovered well from the concussion. I'll do what I can now for the cuts and bruises. I'll let you rest for today, then tomorrow I'll see about resetting that arm, and dealing with any – other injuries that need more involved treatment. I can do everything in one operation – you'll be unconscious throughout. Is that fine with you?'

Very briefly Spock's eyes met the doctor's, and a wealth of unspoken knowledge passed between them in that one fleeting look. The Vulcan seemed grateful for the promise of unconsciousness. Then Spock lowered his gaze again, and nodded.

'That will be quite fine, Doctor,' he said in a soft voice. 'Thank you.'

*Pagebreak*

'All right, Bones – give,' Kirk said tersely, as soon as he gained a moment alone with the doctor.

Spock had returned to his quarters immediately after McCoy had finished treating his superficial injuries, and Jim had not argued with that decision, or asked to be let in through his locked door. It was quite obvious on many levels that all Spock wanted was privacy, and he was content to allow him that, at least for a time. He knew Spock well enough to know when he should not push him. But he was damned if he was going to stay ignorant of what had happened to the Vulcan in that dark room in the storage facility in Oakdale.

'Give you what, Jim?' McCoy asked with deliberate obtuseness.

Kirk shook his head impatiently.

'Bones, don't play with me. I find Spock chained up and beaten, he beams up in a state of what I can only describe as shock, and now he's locked himself away in his room and he won't open the door to me. Spock's been held by hostiles before, but I've never seen him like this. What did they _*do_* to him, Doctor?'

McCoy sighed, tightening his grip on his coffee cup, then loosening it again with deliberate slowness. He suddenly looked _*old_* to Kirk as he sat behind his desk with what appeared to be the weight of too much knowledge resting on him.

'Too much,' he said slowly. 'Too damned much.'

'Bones, you're being almost as evasive as Spock is,' Kirk pushed. 'You're a doctor, you've just examined him. I want to know what you found.'

The doctor shook his head. 'Jim, you know I can't break his confidentiality to tell you. Spock's as tight-lipped as a Rataran roe-mole about it anyway, but – some of it is very clear from my scans. Suffice to say, they put him through hell, and he's just about at rock bottom right now.'

Kirk stirred impatiently, and the doctor sighed again.

'All right, Jim. What I can tell you, as his commanding officer, is – I've released him from sickbay pending an operation to set that arm straight, but I'd recommend keeping him off duty for a while. For the next couple of weeks, at least. Aside from the broken bones and the weight loss, he's just not psychologically fit for such a stressful position at the moment.'

'Broken bones?' Kirk asked quickly, leaning forward. 'What was broken?'

McCoy's eyebrows arched. 'That much he's happy for me to tell you. His jaw was the oldest injury – they cracked it knocking him unconscious when they beamed him to that place, which explains why he's so thin. Half of what they bothered to give him he couldn't manage to eat without enormous pain. But he also had a couple of cracked ribs, and a hairline fracture in his right humerus. It wouldn't have been too serious, but it was repeatedly strained and agitated by his captors and by those cuffs.'

'Dammit, he didn't say anything!' Kirk said, thumping his fist down on the desk. 'All that time I had him running – _*running_* – out of that place – he didn't think to mention broken arms and broken ribs. Hell, I was holding him under his right arm!'

'Spock is very, _*very_* good at putting things like that aside when he needs to,' McCoy reminded him. 'He was probably barely aware of the pain. It would have interfered with his ability to get out of there.'

'Psychologically,' Kirk said, remembering what McCoy had just said. 'What have they done to him, psychologically, Bones?'

'Jim, I told you, I can't break his confidentiality,' the doctor said gently. 'But if you just work with what you already know – just imagine what it must do to a soul, being held chained up in the dark for a month, subjected to tremendous physical violence, and not knowing every time someone came into the room if that was going to be the last thing he'd ever see. Can you imagine that?'

'Don't, Bones,' Kirk muttered. 'Just – don't.'

He thought about that every minute, every hour. It had been all he had been able to think about before they had secured the Vulcan, and he still could not drive it from his mind.

'Talk to him, Jim,' McCoy said earnestly. 'It's what he needs. It's what you need too. Just talk to him.'

'I intend to,' Kirk said grimly. 'Believe me. Just as soon as he unlocks his door.'


	3. Chapter 3

3.

The door to Spock's quarters from the corridor remained as obdurately locked as it had earlier, and there was no response to either Kirk's pressing of the buzzer or his gentle knock. Rather than stand in the public thoroughfare of the corridor pleading to be let in, Jim went into his own quarters and through the bathroom door, to the corresponding door to Spock's quarters. It had been a long time since that door had been locked, but it did not surprise him that it was locked now.

He leant his head against the panel, certain that Spock would have heard him trying the lock. A tiredness swept over him. He had spent all of his supplies of adrenaline in the hectic search through the Oakdale facility to find Spock. Now, having found him, all he wanted was to _*be_* with him, alongside the heat of his body, each taking comfort in the presence of the other.

'Spock, please, let me in,' he said in a low voice.

There was absolute silence from inside Spock's quarters, but Jim _*knew*_ he was there, listening.

Finally Kirk said, 'I could use my override.'

Silence again. Then Spock spoke.

'But you would not.'

'No,' Kirk said finally. 'I won't. You know that. … Would you please let me in?'

The silence persisted. Kirk settled himself on the floor, resting his back and head against the door. He was staring at the mundane bathroom before him, but his attention was firmly on the room just beyond the door. He could _*feel_* Spock, very close to him. He could feel a guarded, churning mind, a mind that wanted to reach out to him but kept curling back on itself, hiding itself from intrusion.

'It was Uhura, really,' Kirk said after another long silence. 'We wouldn't have found you without her. She worked for hours on that transmission they sent, and on other ones later, without you in them. She narrowed down an entire planet to forty square miles. After that, it was just a case of elimination. Half the ship's been focussed on finding you for a month.'

He could feel Spock still – feel the minute relaxation in his thoughts at the sound of Jim's voice, and the comfort he was drawing from it. There were dark tendrils that kept pulling the Vulcan's thoughts away, tangling them together and asking wordless questions – but the surface of that ball of pain and confusion was beginning to be soothed and unravelled.

'Spock…' he said in an almost silent voice.

Finally, finally, the door slid open. Spock was in his uniform, wearing it as if the cloth offered him some kind of defence against what had happened to him, his arm held tightly against his chest by a black sling. He was standing just a few feet from the door, his eyes cast down towards the floor, reminding Jim for all the world of that first time Spock had spoken to him of ponn far – except this Spock was clearly unhealthy in more ways than a simple chemical imbalance. This had been _*done_* to Spock, and it was visible in every bruise and cut and awkward, pain-filled movement.

Anger welled in Jim's chest, but Spock did not react to an emotional flare that would usually have him immediately conscious of his captain's well-being. Despite that surface connection between his thoughts and Spock's that came to life when Jim reached out, the usual deep, constant awareness that they shared was gone, as if a door had been closed somewhere in Spock's mind.

'Spock,' he said softly. 'What did they do to you?'

A muscle twitched in the Vulcan's bruised face. He turned around and sat heavily on the edge of the bed with his eyes still turned to the floor, one hand clenched in his lap as if he very much wanted to ball both his hands together there.

'Spock,' Kirk repeated gently. He wanted to touch the Vulcan, but for the first time in their long relationship he was afraid to reach out.

Spock raised his head. He was no longer looking at the floor, but his eyes were focussed instead on the furiously red drapes on his walls, still avoiding Kirk's face.

'What did they _*do_*?' Jim repeated, kneeling down in front of him.

'At a basic level, when presented with a lack of structure and guidance, or a permissive structure and guidance, humans will revert to their most primitive urges,' Spock said flatly, as if quoting from a book.

'Do you really believe that of us?' Kirk asked sadly.

'It has been demonstrated in studies,' Spock said. 'It is a fact, not a supposition.'

'Spock,' Kirk urged him, reaching out, and stopping just short of touching his knee.

'I was left to the predatory inclinations of the staff,' Spock said in a low, quick voice, as if an explanation was the only way to ward the human away from touching him. 'Humans display – a startling inversion of morality when given implicit permission to do as they please, especially when what they please to do is fuelled by such vehement anger.'

'What did they _*do,_* Spock?' Kirk asked earnestly. 'Just tell me what they did…'

Spock blinked, and shook his head, his eyes still focussed anywhere but Jim's face. He briefly clenched the hand that protruded from his sling, then unclenched it again, and Kirk saw that there was still dirt trapped under ragged fingernails that were usually clean and perfectly manicured. He wanted to kiss the dirt and pain away, but a greater, entirely mental pain was holding him away like a force field.

'They were human, and displayed a natural, but extremely xenophobic, curiosity about my physical makeup,' Spock said a slow, awkward voice. 'When I happened to make them aware of my own human ancestry, they displayed an even greater curiosity, mixed with an even greater disgust. They were very willing to show their supposed superiority and dominance over the Starfleet that was attempting to remove them from their homes…'

'They raped you,' Kirk said in a low voice.

He thought he had known that ever since he had first met Spock's eyes on finding him in that room, but he had desperately wanted it to not be true. Saying it made it real. Saying it made nausea pool in his stomach and bile rise into his throat.

'Amongst other things,' Spock murmured, his eyes cast down to the floor again.

Something hardened in Kirk's chest, a white, nameless fury filling his mind and blotting out everything else from his awareness. He found himself on his feet, turned away from Spock, staring at the red drapes, desperate to _*do_* something and unable to act.

'Anger does not help,' Spock said very quietly, and Kirk spun.

At the sight of the Vulcan every trace of fury died away, pushed to the edges of his mind by an overwhelming need to give comfort and solace to the one he loved.

'I experienced anger – great anger,' Spock continued in the same quiet voice. 'But it did not help. I could not stop them…'

There it was – the tiniest break in Spock's voice, as if a sob was trying to break through. The force field between them seemed to melt, and almost without being aware of his own movement Jim was suddenly cradling Spock in his arms, as if by holding him he could drive away what had happened. The Vulcan's broken and braced arm inserted a hardness between them, but Spock leant into him, his head firm against Jim's chest, listening to the human beating of his heart – and for a moment that stirred another memory in him, and he stiffened.

'Spock?' Jim asked softly, feeling the Vulcan move minutely away from him.

Spock relaxed again, letting his head rest on Jim again, pulling on disciplines to replace the sickening memory with the comforting present.

'I will be all right,' he murmured. 'I know it will take time, but I will be all right.'

The anger began to flicker at Jim's mind again, a solid wedge of it in his chest, shimmering in adrenaline through his arms and legs and hands. Spock's calm, rational acceptance of his trauma was almost worse than an emotional breakdown.

'Who did it?' he asked in a hard voice, staring past Spock's dark head at the opposite wall. 'What were their names, what did they look like?'

Spock hesitated, then straightened away from his captain, staring at the wall like him, and saying as if he was reading a roll call, 'Piper. McNeill. Jonas. Brewster. Those names were spoken. I – don't know the others.'

'All human, all male,' Kirk said quietly.

'All human, all male,' Spock echoed in a hollow voice. 'As to descriptions…' He shook his head. 'I – '

Kirk looked at him, and registered a reluctance that Spock himself did not understand to give a precise description of the men. Perhaps delineating them with words would bring him too close to the reality of them.

'It doesn't matter for now,' Kirk murmured.

Very human feelings were churning in the captain's head – horror at what had happened to the one he loved, shame that those who had done it had been men like him, shame at his own fury that was the last thing Spock needed right now. And something else… A curious, sick fear at touching Spock, at embracing him and facing everything that had happened. Why was he so afraid, he wondered? Perhaps because Spock himself seemed so wary of the touch, because Spock seemed to want to curl himself up in solitude and shut himself away from the events of the past month. For him to take comfort from Jim, Spock would have to accept what had happened to himself.

'What is happening regarding the colonists – the evacuation?' Spock asked eventually.

'Oh,' Kirk said slowly, taken aback. His mind had focussed tightly on Spock, and only Spock. The evacuation seemed like something belonging to another world. 'Er – the Federation is sending ships, on schedule,' he said. 'Passenger ships to take the people and their belongings, and some fleet ships with troops in case of – '

'In case of violence,' Spock finished for him. 'There will be violence, I'm sure.'

'Yes,' Kirk said slowly.

That long, drawn out, cruel violence that Spock had suffered seemed so much more significant than the threat of physical resistance to the evacuation.

'There was never any chance of them giving in to what those men were demanding,' Kirk said. 'They tasked us with finding you, and carried on with the evacuation procedure regardless. They would have let you – ' he began bitterly, but found himself unable to complete the sentence.

'I never did expect capitulation,' Spock said. 'It was my duty – '

'To be raped?' Kirk asked angrily. 'You didn't sign up for that.'

'I signed up to devote my time, and my life, if necessary, to Starfleet,' Spock said flatly. 'We all accept the possibility of violence or death. It is part of the contract.'

'Not to be raped,' Kirk repeated fiercely.

Spock flinched. He was silent for a moment, then said in a strained tone, 'Please… Repeating it does not – It does not – '

'No,' Kirk muttered. 'No, I know… Spock, I – need to go up to the bridge. I need to sort out the mess I left behind by breaking into that facility.'

'Of course,' Spock nodded, with almost too much understanding in his tone.

'You'll be all right?' Kirk asked, looking hard at him.

'I will be all right,' Spock nodded, not returning the gaze. 'I would welcome the chance to meditate.'

'All right,' Kirk nodded, still watching him intently. 'If you're sure.'

Spock flicked his eyes up to Jim's face, and away again.

'I am sure. Go, Jim. Do your duty.'

*Pagebreak*

Alone, Spock sat motionless on the edge of his bed. Five minutes passed, and he had not changed his position from how it had been when Jim had left the room. He certainly was not meditating, despite his professed desire to do so. Instead he was staring unseeing at the red drapes just a few feet away, as if a kind of inertia had taken over his body and mind.

He felt just as trapped, here in his rooms.

He shook his head. No. How could that be? He was not bound and filthy, in pain, and kept in darkness and subject to every indignity that they could heap upon him. But – He looked toward the door, and looked away again. He felt he had no more power to leave this room than he had to leave that other place. He could not bear to present himself to other eyes, he could not escape from this body that they had used to torment his mind.

He turned back towards the wall, curling his uninjured arm about himself, condensing himself into as small a space as possible. Oh, to cease to exist, even just for a short time… To stop his mind from thinking and his body from reminding him of the betrayal of his own flesh.

Tomorrow, he told himself firmly. Tomorrow McCoy would fix the warped bone of his upper arm. Tomorrow he would fix everything, erase everything, remove all trace…

The intercom whistled. Spock uncurled, and touched his hand to the button automatically.

'Spock here.'

'Spock.' It was McCoy, sounding falsely casual. 'Just checking on you. How are you doing?'

'I am quite fine, Doctor,' he said by rote.

'That arm feeling all right?'

'It is acceptable.'

'Jim with you?'

Spock sighed silently. There was an oddness, an emptiness, where his ever-present awareness of Jim should be. It was entirely his own fault, but he missed it.

'The captain is on the bridge, I believe,' he said. 'I was attempting to meditate,' he continued. That was not _*quite_* a lie, but it would be sufficient to make the doctor leave him alone.

'Okay,' McCoy said after a short hesitation. 'I'll check in on you later. And I want you in sickbay tomorrow at nine.'

'Of course,' Spock nodded. 'Spock out.'

He cut the channel without further preamble, and the silence settled around him again. Inbetween those torturous visits from his captors silence had been his companion for a month. It had grown to become a solid, enveloping thing, a mixture of menace and reassurance. It had been a representation of neglect, a time for his thoughts to curl in on themselves and torment him – but it had also meant that _*they_* were not there, that his body was his own, and that he could have peace.

He stood restlessly, and paced across the room. Here on the ship, with no threat from those men, the silence was just an opportunity for his awareness of his own mind and body to swell into an unnatural, tormenting monster. How did he regain ownership, regain control, over what was indubitably his? Meditation would not come to him. There was a Vulcan saying, as old as Surak, that a sandstorm must settle before the garden could be righted. There was no point in fighting uselessly in swirling dust to create order from chaos. He would have to let the churning chaos in his mind settle somewhat before he tried to make sense of what was left behind. He would have to wait for the storm to come to its natural conclusion.

He stood for a moment, letting his most Vulcan mask settle on his face, and then, secure behind the façade, strode to the door and left the room.

*Pagebreak**

It was a cold, dangerous, controlled fury that sent Kirk to the bridge. He sat in his command chair as if it was the throne of a dictator, his hands clenched over the natural wood of the armrests, and stared at the revolving, earth-like planet on the screen. It looked so peaceful, so natural, from this altitude. But then, the men down there were natural. Their actions were natural – to a point. His fingers tightened on the armrests. To a point…

His own reaction was natural too. He sat here with the full force of a starship at his fingertips. He could unleash banks of phaser power on the main settlements and facilities, and blast the population to oblivion.

He could…

He only needed to forge the correct orders from Command, to say the words with the right authority.

But no. That was where he differed from that handful of men on the planet. He would not unleash his fury unfairly, indiscriminately and cruelly. He would do it by the book. He would hate it, but he would do it by the book – or at least, as close to the book as he needed to be for his actions to stand up to scrutiny.

_*Amongst other things,*_ he found himself thinking. Those words of Spock's haunted him. What other things could rape fall amongst that would equate with or surpass that horror? He saw Spock's body, always perfect to him, always clean and lithe and supple like a cat, being degraded by those – those *_men*_, he thought dully. Those humans. No more nor less than human men, just like him.

_*What had they done?_*

He tightened his hands on the wooden armrests. Perhaps Spock would never tell him. Perhaps he would never know. Perhaps he would have to let go and move forward, without knowing that dark moment of Spock's history. The Vulcan was certainly quite capable of partitioning off certain portions of his memory from the most intimate of mental touches. He had no illusions that Spock would suddenly choose to relate everything that had happened, or show any physical scars from their abuse. McCoy would be the closest to knowing the full truth.

He had to hold back jealousy at that thought. It was ridiculous to feel jealous of the doctor. It wasn't as if Spock had chosen to take him into his confidence over Jim himself. It was just a natural consequence of McCoy's role on the ship.

He became aware that Sulu was looking at him curiously, and he shook himself out of his preoccupation.

'Er – hold orbit, Mr Sulu,' he said, quite unnecessarily. There were no orders he needed to give the helmsman at the moment, but he needed to deflect the curiosity somehow.

'Yes, sir,' Sulu said, giving away no opinion on the captain's distraction in his smooth tone. For all of his humanity, Sulu often displayed the impassive, unquestioning demeanour of a Vulcan.

Sulu turned back to his console, and Kirk exhaled silently, letting his hard gaze fall on the viewscreen again. If he was going to use the excuse of his duty to avoid sitting in the atmosphere of Spock's dark, tortured thoughts, then he should at least do something active to resolve the problem. Much as he hated to look at Spock in his damaged, introverted state, he could not stand the thought of being separated from him mentally and physically on any permanent basis.

'Lieutenant Uhura,' he said, without turning in his chair.

'Aye, sir?' she asked attentively.

'Have the security team reported back from the surface yet?'

'Five minutes ago, sir,' she said. 'They've secured the Oakdale facility, but they're waiting on your orders to deal with the administration building for the site. According to interview with one of the men from the storage site the ringleaders are in there. Commander Giotto has the exits covered, but he's requested more backup, since they're dealing with – well – conscious hostiles,' she finished rather awkwardly.

'Yes, of course,' Kirk said in a tone of satisfaction, remembering the raw human pleasure he had gained from stunning man after man in the storage facility, not even waiting for them to drop before he pushed past in his frantic search for Spock. Giotto's job in there would have involved little more than locating the unconscious bodies and arranging for transport.

'Have a team of ten security men assembled in the transporter room in five minutes,' he said. 'I'll meet them down there.'

'Of course, Captain,' she said without question.

His jaw tightened as he stared at the viewscreen. The planet's main continent was revolving relentlessly before him, with Oakdale visible as nothing more than a slight brown blur, more from the storm-ruined fields surrounding it than the conurbation itself.

'*_Revenge is a kind of wild justice,_*' he found himself murmuring, his eyes narrowing a little.

Now where had that come from? He couldn't remember. Somewhere in his ranks of learning, somewhere in one of the flaking leather-bound books in his quarters. Whoever had said that – he thanked them for giving words for his feelings. A wild justice would suit him just fine.

'Captain?' Uhura asked curiously from behind him.

He started, and rubbed a hand over his face.

'Nothing, Lieutenant,' he murmured. 'Nothing at all.'

'Was – Mr Spock hurt very badly?' she asked – and suddenly Kirk could feel the entire bridge crew riveting their attention upon him.

'Badly enough,' he said darkly. He was silent for a moment, then said, 'Mr Sulu, I'm beaming down to – exert some justice on those responsible for abducting Commander Spock. Take command.'

'Aye, sir,' Sulu nodded, exchanging a quick glance of understanding with Chekov at navigation.

Kirk gave a brief nod of acknowledgement, and left the bridge.

*Pagebreak*

Fifteen minutes of walking the ship's corridors did nothing to help the restless, revolving chaos that was currently possessing Spock's mind. Every face he saw seemed distorted with curiosity, pity, or a mocking sense of victory. He must, he _*must,_* be distorting what he saw. He knew intellectually that there was little chance that _Enterprise_ crewmembers were glad of his suffering. He knew intellectually that it was impossible for them to know exactly what had been done to him on the planet below. But still – how could he look on human faces with equanimity in the knowledge of what they were capable of doing to their fellow beings? How could he respond to their nods of greeting or instinctive utterances of 'sir' as he passed without overlaying what humans had done to him?

He found himself outside the transporter room. Jim, he knew, had beamed down ten minutes earlier. The captain had called him to let him know, catching him as he walked past a corridor intercom, speaking quietly in a message meant for his partner rather than his first officer. There was no need for the _*captain_* to tell Spock that he was beaming down to round up those responsible for his treatment – but there was every reason for _*Jim_* to tell him.

He hesitated for a few brief moments, regarding the brilliant red of the door, recalling his exit from that room just a few hours earlier. The smell… It was the stench of his captivity that lingered most strongly in his mind. The pain, and the feeling of filth on his skin, and filth in his clothing, were ghosts of memories that could be pushed to the edges of his consciousness. But the stench seemed to follow him like a live thing, as if he stank still. The delicate, underlying scent of chill, dank dust, of cardboard and concrete, of stale food and stale water. Then the other scents on top like a blow. Urine, acrid and rich with ammonia, excrement and blood and other bodily fluids. All of the disgusting evidence of the reality of his body and the bodies of others. The smell had seemed to follow him all the way to the shower in sickbay, stronger against the clean scent of the ship around him.

He took in a deep breath, shaking the memory away. He did not smell still. He knew that, logically. He just needed to force the susceptible, emotional parts of his mind to believe it.

He took a step forward, and the door opened in front of him, blissfully unconscious of any of the torturous twists and turns of his mind that had led him here.

The transporter operator looked up in mild interest – and then in blatant surprise as he recognised the Vulcan.

Spock did not turn his eyes to the man's face, knowing how he had appeared when he had last passed through this door. Instead he walked briskly to the transporter platform and positioned himself on one of the terminals.

'Beam me down to the captain's last coordinates,' he said flatly, his eyes focussed on the wall behind the lieutenant's head.

'But, sir – ' the man began doubtfully, eyeing Spock's bandaged arm and bruised face.

Spock turned an icy gaze on him, letting a veil of authority cover over his current insecurities.

'Have my beaming privileges been restricted, Lieutenant?'

'No, sir,' he faltered. 'But – '

'Then please beam me down to the captain's last coordinates,' he said, resuming his stiff, ready-for-transport pose.

There was another tiny hesitation, then the man said, 'Yes, sir. Straight away.'

*Pagebreak*

The sight of the planet, so serene and normal, momentarily took his breath away. How could a windless, sun-blasted day appear so – he groped for a word, and from somewhere in his realms of cultural education drew _*unheimlich_*. That chilling horror of something so normal that had been shot through with evil. The devoted mother about to kill her child with sugar-sweetened poison. The summer landscape shimmering with deadly radiation. The innocent concrete-built storage facility where overalled workmen had inflicted such cruelty upon a prisoner chained to a staple in the floor, while outside children had played and the grass had continued to grow and the sun continued to shine…

He felt a minute tremor pass through him, like the forewarning of an earthquake, and clenched his fist, trying to control his physical and mental response. There was no point in losing control. Not yet.

But then he saw him… Standing in the shadow of the building, sullen and restless, the man had presumably been rounded up from somewhere nearby and left with a single guard, waiting perhaps for more captives before being beamed up. Spock didn't know his name – but he knew the scent of him, and the timbre of his voice, and the feeling of his fingers digging into Spock's hips as he exacted his own form of punishment for the sins of Starfleet. He knew intimately the scent of his sweat, and the noises he made as he lost himself in climax, and the roughness of his clothes against Spock's exposed skin. He knew the heat of his urine, and the sting of it as it struck open wounds, and the feeling of his boot striking soft flesh with enough force to create those wounds.

The anger was like another being inside him, swelling like a mushroom cloud, permeating every cell of his body. Possessed by it, he crossed the hundred yards between them with barely any awareness that he had moved. He had spoken to the security officer in his normal, steady voice without any knowledge of what he had said to make him move aside.

Spock drew his uninjured arm back, his fist clenched so tightly that the knuckles stood out like bare bone. In a blur of motion he released the pent up energy, and the man was abruptly lying on the ground, blood welling from his nose and dripping onto the ground, his eyes rolling back in his head. Spock stepped forward, raising his foot in the beginnings of a kick that was undeniably aimed between the fallen man's legs.

'Spock!'

Jim's cry cut through the air like a shot, causing the Vulcan to freeze. He had not even been aware of the captain's presence until he heard him speak. The anger trembled through him like a wild thing caught in a cage. He wanted to release it. He wanted with every fibre of his body to release it. But Jim's shout was like a leash caught about him, and he could not move.

He lowered his foot to the ground, and stood, very still, with his free hand behind his back. It was more than just Jim behind him, he was sure. That was confirmed by a flash of red in the corner of his eye as the security team rounded him and stood at semi-attention about the unconscious body.

'Just out cold,' one of them said succinctly, bending to the man and touching his fingers to his neck. 'He'll recover.'

The others were looking at him with a mixture of curiosity and awe. Spock kept his attention for the captain, and ignored the other men.

'Mr Spock,' Kirk said in his most formal tone. His stance held nothing but official censure, but there was a softness in his eyes that only Spock could see. 'You had no business beaming down here,' he continued in a low, iron tone.

'No, sir,' Spock replied in a rigidly controlled voice. He could feel his own heart, pounding against his ribs.

Kirk took a step closer, lowering his voice further still.

'Spock, I'm saying this for your own good. Go back to the ship. Let me deal with this. I know – I _*understand_* – exactly what you want to do to this lot. That's why you _*have_* to leave it to me.'

There was a moment when Spock's gaze really _*connected_* with Jim's, for the first time since the captain had rescued him from the storage facility. Then he nodded, and reached for his communicator.

'Spock,' Kirk said, touching his fingers to the Vulcan's arm as he stepped backwards. 'I'm glad someone did it to the bastard,' he said in an undertone. 'Now get back to the ship. I'll come see you as soon as I've beamed up.'

Spock nodded succinctly, keeping any emotion in his response solely confined to his eyes. But that one moment of uncontrolled anger had, perhaps, weakened the wall that had been hovering between him and Jim. Something had released inside him, like a stick pulled from the cogs of a machine, and he felt that his frozen interior was starting to move again.

'Jim,' he began in a low, soft voice.

'I know,' Kirk said quickly, cutting him off. They had agreed long ago to keep any evidence of their relationship firmly out of their interactions while on duty. 'I know,' Jim repeated more gently. 'Beam up, now, Commander,' he said in a tone that was full of warmth despite its firmness. 'I will come find you. I promise.'

Spock exhaled, pulling his shirt straight with his good hand, keeping his injured arm relaxed despite the shockwaves of anger that were rippling through him. They were fading now, shivering through his body with less force, but still, they were there, and while they were there he was not fit to be seen. How far would his outburst have damaged his standing as the second most senior member of the _Enterprise_ crew? His eyes became a shade more veiled again as he opened his communicator and gave the request to beam up.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

Kirk watched Spock's figure dissolve into gold sparkles, and then fade into non-existence. He found himself staring aimlessly at a patch of trees that had been behind where the Vulcan was standing, and shook himself abruptly, turning back to the gathered group of security men and the unconscious figure on the ground. The blood that had been dripping from the man's nose was beginning to mingle with the dust, looking black and slightly sordid. The man looked as if he had been felled in a bar fight.

He looked up, glancing at the faces of his red-shirted men, registering their mixed emotions of discomfort and satisfaction. No one knew the true extent of Spock's treatment, but Kirk was almost certain that the entire crew was outraged by his abduction and captivity.

There was a pounding of feet, and a young ensign came out of the building behind at a half-jog, clutching something in his hand.

'Sir,' he said without preamble, his eyes flicking briefly between his captain and the man on the ground. He held out his clenched hand. 'Found this, sir, in the supervision room. It's the cassette from the camera in the room where you found Mr Spock.'

Kirk's eyes opened briefly in astonishment. He had not even thought about the place having security cameras.

'I've not looked at it at all, sir,' the man continued with an air of discretion. 'But I thought it might contain something useful.'

Kirk held his hand out wordlessly, and closed it about the slim yellow cassette that the man handed him. He clenched his fist on it, letting its hard edges press into his palm, then drew himself out of his preoccupation, and looked up at the ensign.

'Good work, Garrovick,' he nodded. 'Umm – ' He looked about at the other men, fixing his gaze finally on Lieutenant Mendez, who was leading the group. 'You've done a good job,' he said. 'Go on back to where we have the captives secured, and arrange their beam-up to the ship. I'll deal with this one,' he added, nodding down at the unconscious man on the floor.

'Yes, sir,' Mendez nodded immediately, and gestured for his men to proceed.

Kirk stood watching them for a few moments as they trooped off about the corner of the building. Then he turned his gaze back to the unconscious man on the ground in front of him. He waited for a few moments, turning something over in his mind. And then he positioned himself exactly where Spock had been standing as Jim's shout had halted him, raised his foot in exactly the same way that the Vulcan had done – and unleashed his anger in the same vicious kick that he had prevented Spock from performing.

Unconscious, the man did not respond – but Kirk smiled in grim satisfaction anyway.

*Pagebreak*

'And you say _*Spock_* did this?' McCoy asked incredulously, looking down at the prone, bloodied figure that lay in one of his sickbay beds.

'Spock punched him,' Kirk nodded.

'He shouldn't have even beamed down,' the doctor muttered. 'And what about this bruising here?' he asked, moving the scanner down the unconscious man's body. 'Spock do that too?'

'I – er – ' Kirk prevaricated.

'I see,' McCoy said in a grim tone, although a deep approval of the action was obvious to Kirk under the doctor's appearance of censure. 'Well,' he said, exhaling slowly. 'I – could give him some painkillers, but there's not much else to be done for the man. Better let him come round in the brig.'

'And the painkillers?' Kirk asked, as the doctor moved toward the intercom.

McCoy shrugged, assuming an innocent expression. 'Running low on supplies, Jim. I think it's best I reserve them for cases of _*real_* need, don't you think?'

'Oh, undoubtedly,' Kirk nodded quickly, trying hard to keep a smirk from his face.

'What's that, Jim?' the doctor asked curiously, nodding at Kirk's hand as he returned from giving the transfer order through the intercom.

Kirk followed his gaze, remembering the yellow cassette that he still held clenched hard in his left fist.

'Oh,' he said slowly. 'It's – something one of the men found in that storage complex,' he said carefully. 'Apparently there was a security camera kept running in the room that Spock was kept in. This – is the record of that month…'

McCoy met his eyes, immediately reading the tumult of indecision that was plaguing the captain. The recording was evidence. It was absolutely necessary to the case. It was invaluable. But it was also voyeuristic, underhand and unpleasant. Jim _*knew_* that Spock would not want him to see it. He would not want McCoy to see it either. It was the captain's duty to watch it, and he wanted to watch it, to see what it was that Spock would not tell him about that month of abuse. But – all in all, it represented an enormous betrayal of the Vulcan's wishes and privacy.

'I – just don't know what to do, Bones,' Kirk said eventually, shaking his head. 'Spock would hate for anyone to see this. He'd hate for _*me_* to see it…'

'I must admit, seeing Spock getting tortured isn't my idea of viewing pleasure,' McCoy muttered. 'But there must be names and faces on that tape. There must be unassailable evidence.'

'Yes,' Kirk said darkly, looking down pensively at the cassette. 'And – I _*have*_ to watch it, Bones.'

*Pagebreak*

'Spock,' Kirk said simply as he came through the door into the Vulcan's rooms. He didn't waste further breath on speech, but came forward instead and enclosed the Vulcan firmly in his arms. He spread his palm out on the Vulcan's back, feeling the heat of his flesh and the pulsing of his heart against it, and silently treasuring it for being alive and whole and _*here_* for him to embrace.

'I'm sorry,' Jim murmured. 'I know I said I'd come right away on beaming up, but there were – things – to deal with.'

'I did not know the time of your transport back to the ship,' Spock pointed out rationally.

Kirk smiled. The voice and tone and sentiment were so typical of his normal, undamaged, everyday _*Spock_*. The Vulcan might have been speaking to anyone on the ship. But the heat of his breath on the human's ear and that continual feeling of his heart beating deep in his chest were such beautiful realities, such visceral things. Only Jim was allowed to experience those things amongst all the people on board. He had missed that so badly.

'Well,' he murmured. 'I did beam up a few hours ago – but like I said, there were things – '

. 'That you hesitate to name to me,' Spock said, still in that steady voice. His own hand was steady on Kirk's back, but there was convention in the gesture, a simple reciprocation of Jim's own touch, rather than passion.

'There – are a lot of things that I hesitate to name to you,' Jim said in a low voice, pressing the side of his head briefly against Spock's before releasing him and stepping back.

What Jim had seen on that tape had so shaken him that just at that moment it seemed to be he who was in dire need of comfort and reassurance, and Spock who was in control. He wanted to say _*sorry_* to the Vulcan with every inch of his body, but there seemed to be no words eloquent enough to express the depth of his feeling, and it was obvious that bodily contact was not Spock's first desire at the moment.

He inhaled deeply, pulling back a degree of control as he regarded Spock's impassive face and dark eyes. He knew the Vulcan well enough to know that the impassivity was a blind against his true feelings, but he was grateful for the pretence of calm.

'Spock, one of the security men found this,' he said, holding out the yellow cassette. He held it on the palm of his hand, almost like a gift.

Spock took the cassette slowly, and turned it in his hand. He knew instantly what it was. A standard surveillance cassette. There was only one place it could have come from – only one place so hauntingly relevant to him. He closed his eyes briefly as memory pushed away his current reality. It had been no more than a matter of hours since he had been enclosed in that room, apparently with no hope of release. He had not even slept since. His arms still felt the stiffness of being pinned behind him. His knees still felt the dull ache of being required to kneel on an unrelenting concrete floor. For a few hours that reality had been chased away by this one – and now here it was again, encapsulated in one slim cassette, intruding into this safe, warm place like a taunt left behind by one of his tormentors.

'No,' he said slowly, staring at the vibrant rectangle of plastic in his hand. 'No, I – will not – '

He was being incoherent. He knew that. But it did not seem to matter.

Spock walked across to his meditation statue with its slow burning fire, and dropped the cassette into the embers. The yellow surface shimmered momentarily, then seemed to collapse in on itself, leaving a molten mess in the fire pot and the acrid scent of burning plastic in the air. The captain did not so much as twitch a muscle in an attempt to stop him.

He looked up at Jim, meeting his eyes as realisation dawned gently.

'You have copied the contents,' he said in a level voice.

Jim nodded slowly. 'It's procedure to make back-ups of evidence where possible,' he said softly. 'You know that.'

'And – you have watched it,' Spock said.

Jim was silent. He looked down at the carpet, and then nodded sombrely.

'I've – skimmed it,' he said. 'I've seen enough to – *_hate_* those men with every fibre of my soul. It would take a month to watch the whole thing – literally.'

Spock nodded silently, the corners of his mouth tightening. He knew why Jim had watched it. He was not about to launch into recriminations for a betrayal of trust. But he dearly wished that Jim _*had not_* watched it… The glass screen of awkwardness that kept shimmering into being between them had materialised again. He did not know what to say to his own partner, his bondmate, the dearest person in the world to him. He had been turned into someone else by his month in that room, and just as he was starting to regain himself the shared knowledge of what had happened had transformed him again. Jim was just the same – but he himself felt like a stranger…

'It would be best – for you to leave me,' he said haltingly.

He _*felt_* the shock and pain that rippled through Jim at that statement. He felt it through the bond that their minds and souls shared, felt it as if it had originated in his own mind.

'No,' he hastened to reassure the human, holding up a hand, although he could not quite let himself make physical contact. 'I – don't mean permanently, Jim. I'm – sorry – truly sorry – for what I am at this time. But I – am not fit to be seen.'

'By _*me?_*' Jim asked plaintively, his eyes widening a little. 'Even by _*me,_*

Spock?'

'Even by myself,' Spock said with a trace of dark humour. 'Even by the mirrors in the bathroom and the impressions my feet make on the carpet and my shadow on the floor.'

'Spock, you can't wish yourself into non-existence,' Jim said softly, understanding implicitly the feelings behind the Vulcan's statement. 'And you *_shouldn't*_ wish yourself into non-existence. This isn't _*your_* fault. It's _*theirs._* All theirs.' At Spock's continued silence he said stoutly, 'I _*will_* see you, Spock. God knows, you've had enough imposed on you recently, but I'm going to impose a little more. I won't let you lock yourself away. I won't let you hide from me. We will share this – as much for my sake as for yours. Spock…'

He laid his hands gently on either side of the Vulcan's face, stopping him with the lightest of touches from turning away, and then touching his lips to Spock's despite Spock's own lack of reaction.

'Whatever they did to you, Spock,' he said. 'Wherever they touched you or what they did – I don't care. They haven't left a taint on you – not to me, no matter how tainted you feel. The evil is in them, not in you.'

Spock sighed, and his shoulders seemed to droop momentarily.

'Spock,' Jim said slowly. 'Spock, I – need you to do something,' he said with great caution. He was aware of how much he was piling on the Vulcan at the moment, but there was very little option.

'Yes,' Spock said cautiously. 'I – do endeavour to be reasonable,' he added in understanding of Jim's awkwardness.

'Yes, I – know,' Jim nodded. 'It's the men we rounded up. I've – got them lined up in the shuttle bay,' he said in a tone that was almost apologetic. 'I want you to come to the observation deck. You can identify them without them seeing you. I – thought it would be easier that way.'

Spock regarded him, momentarily wondering if this tactic was for his protection, or for the men's. Perhaps both. He himself could not be certain that he would be able to face them with equanimity.

'Is it strictly necessary?' he asked, although he knew the answer to that question.

'Yes,' Kirk said softly. 'I have to have a positive identification. The tape isn't always clear.'

Spock's head dropped a minute amount, and Jim reached out to touch a hand to his cheek. For a split second there was a burst of mental awareness, and then Spock's shields raised again.

'I'm sorry,' Jim murmured.

'No,' Spock said quickly, capturing his hand before he could lower it. 'It is not your fault. I – learnt to shield…'

For an instant, through the contact with Spock's face, an image flashed into Jim's mind – an awareness more than a video replay – of hands gripping roughly onto either side of his face, and pain lancing through his jaw, and of a male, human scent and warmth moving closer despite his attempts to struggle away.

Jim recoiled, disgust rising in his throat – and then he looked up and saw the expression on Spock's face.

'No!' Jim protested, registering in an instant Spock's feeling of betrayal mingled with self-loathing. 'No, Spock – not disgust at you. Disgust at that – that memory, that event. At the thought of it happening to me, to you…'

'I – did not mean to inflict that on you,' Spock said in a low voice. 'It's best that I – keep myself closed away. Keep my mind from yours. There's too much – '

'_*No,_* Spock,' Jim protested. 'I've been cut off from you for too long. I've _*missed_* you, Spock. What happened to you – it's not your fault. It's something terrible that's happened to you, not that's coming from you. You can't help remembering.'

'I – wish I could help it,' he murmured in a very human way.

'Spock…'

Jim moved forward, hesitated momentarily, then moved forward again firmly, touching his lips to Spock's bruised ones in a gentle, chaste, but determined kiss.

'Spock,' he said, cupping his hand against the back of Spock's head and resting his forehead against his. 'If it's too much to let me in, if you've got too used to shielding yourself against their thoughts, if you want to keep it to yourself – then do what you have to do. But don't block me for _*my_* sake. Whatever they did, I just want to help you through it.'

Spock's eyelids fluttered closed over his eyes, as if to shut out the closeness of Jim's own gaze.

'I – am not fond of my own thoughts at the moment,' he murmured. 'But they are, at least, confined to my own awareness – no one else's.'

'You won't – taint me with your thoughts, Spock,' Kirk insisted. 'I just want to be close to you again.'

'I – am not ready,' Spock said, his lips hardly moving.

'No,' Jim said slowly. 'No, I know. It's just – the only way I know to comfort you is to touch you. To hug you and hold you. It's – the human way. But I know you don't want that right now. I know that touching and mental contact are so intimately linked. I know that touching's been – a different thing to you for the past month…'

Spock looked at him silently. There was nothing that he could say.

'Will you come to the observation deck?' Kirk asked, biting back his feelings behind a veil of duty. 'Will you do that for me?'

Spock nodded simply, and turned toward the door.

'Now,' he said. 'The sooner it is done, the better.'

*Pagebreak*

The slanted windows of the observation deck looked down upon the shuttle bay from high up in the rear wall, a soundproof and easily overlooked portal onto the vast bay. A single shuttle sat tethered in the centre of the bay, as it always did, ready for launch, but the near end of the room was taken up by an untidy line of recalcitrant men, standing and shuffling and muttering to one another, under the eyes of five exceptionally neat and efficient looking security men. The civilian captives were not even glancing towards the high-up windows. It was unlikely they even knew they were there.

On the observation deck, Spock stood an arm's length from the window, looking down at the restless humans without speaking. He regarded the row of men with a blank expression, his eyes dark and unreadable. Jim glanced at him, and could see the slight tension about the lips that suggested discomfort.

'You recognise them?' he asked quietly.

Spock nodded tightly. In the dim light he looked far older than his true age.

'Almost all… Not – ' He inhaled slowly, then continued, 'Not the individual at the right hand end of the line, nor the auburn-haired one who is fourth in line. I have never, to my recollection, seen their faces.'

His eyes scanned the line again, his head hardly moving, and his gaze rested on one of the men who was standing rather awkwardly, with an obviously swollen nose and damaged lip.

'I – should not have struck him,' Spock said, glancing at Kirk and seeing he was focussed on the same man. 'I – suppose there must be disciplinary action.'

'Shouldn't have struck who?' Kirk asked innocently, deliberately focussing on the window before them rather than on Spock's face. 'Oh!' he said, as if realisation was dawning. 'Him. I don't know who hit him, Spock. I mean, I saw you standing there after he'd fallen, but I didn't see anyone hit him.'

'Lieutenant Alcock,' Spock suggested, 'was guarding him.'

'Oh – yes,' Kirk said, still in that same light tone. 'I spoke to him afterwards. He said he was distracted by – a bird call – and when he looked back the man was on the ground. He wondered if – a ball had gone astray from a ball game, or something…'

Spock looked at his captain with piercing eyes, then nodded slowly.

'I see,' he said succinctly.

'What about the rest of them?' Kirk pressed gently. 'Is there anyone you can pick out, definitely?'

Spock took in a breath.

'I can identify six of them who were directly involved in the imprisonment,' he said in a level voice. 'The second from the left – struck me with a metal bar when I was beamed to the facility. He is responsible for concussion, the broken jaw, and some later beatings. The fifth from the left broke my arm with his foot, and was involved in multiple attacks. The sixth in line – made certain that I was supplied with drinking water and food, but – he also – harmed me physically. The seventh, eighth and tenth beat me also.' He looked directly, almost defiantly, at Kirk for a moment. 'Is that enough?'

Kirk exhaled slowly. 'It's enough to haul those ones out of line and be sure they bear the brunt of the blame. But – you could give me more, Spock.'

Spock's jaw tightened. 'I have given enough,' he said in a taut voice.

He turned away from the slanted window, looking instead to those other windows that gave on to deep space and its mute panorama of blazing stars.

'But if you want them to be punished for what they did – ' Jim began from behind him.

Spock's shoulders stiffened, and he took another step closer to the cold, transparent aluminium panes that separated him from the vacuum outside. Despite his attempt to conceal his face from Jim the human could see it, reflected perfectly in the glass, shadowed by the blackness of space beyond.

'I do not want to prosecute,' Spock said in a low voice.

'Spock – ' Jim faltered, touching a hand to his shoulder, and then quickly dropping it again. 'Spock, I can bring a certain amount of charges to bear for their attack on a Starfleet officer, but to put those animals where they belong _*needs_* a deposition from you on exactly what they _*did_* to you.'

'I do not want to prosecute,' Spock repeated, in a voice that had begun to tremble slightly.

'But – *_why,_* Spock?' Kirk insisted, his own anguish at the Vulcan's decision pushing through into his voice. '*_Why?*_'

'They considered themselves subject to an act of war,' Spock said without turning, without an alteration in tone. 'They did what is natural to humans during war – what is natural to humans to do to their captives.'

'_*Spock,_*' Jim insisted. 'You're half-human. Do you think your mother's capable of that? Your grandparents, your cousins? Are _*you_* capable?'

Something flashed deep in Spock's eyes, but whatever the emotion was he suppressed it before it could truly manifest itself.

'The imprisonment is enough to convict them,' he said in a dark, introverted voice. 'I can identify those who were involved in the imprisonment. There is evidence enough for that without any other testimony.'

'All right,' Kirk said finally, trying to keep all traces of his bewilderment and disappointment from his voice. 'All right, Spock. If that's what you want, then – that's enough. We'll – keep it simple, charge them with the abduction and false imprisonment – and – with the physical abuse and neglect?' he asked in a questioning tone. 'The kicking and punching, and broken bones, lack of food and medical care – nothing more.'

Spock nodded minutely.

'That is enough,' he nodded. 'Now,' he said, his shoulders slumping a little, 'I would like to return to my quarters. I am – very tired – and McCoy has surgery scheduled for me tomorrow morning. Rest would seem advisable.'

'Yes, I guess so,' Kirk said, trying to keep his voice natural.

He put his hand to Spock's back as he turned, again trying to remain natural, using a light, casual touch that he was used to sharing when they were unobserved. Spock stiffened, a tremor shuddering down his spine, a look as if he was about to vomit suddenly passing across his face.

Jim removed his hand as if he had been burned, realising that in his effort to be natural he had reached a little too low, and touched the top of the Vulcan's buttock rather than the small of his back.

'I'm sorry,' he said immediately, clenching his fist. 'Spock, I – '

Spock controlled himself with a great effort, his own remorse clear in his face.

'It – is me, not you,' he said in a tight voice. 'I – am suffering a certain amount of pain…'

'I'm sorry,' Jim repeated, very well aware that the pain was at least as much mental as physical. 'I won't – '

'Yes,' Spock murmured, then said in a stronger voice, 'I will be in my room, Jim. I – would very much rather be alone tonight.'

He left the room without further hesitation, without looking back or even faltering in his step. The door slid closed behind him, seeming to lock a cloying silence into the room where Jim was left behind.

The captain turned back to the windows that looked out over the panorama of space, and pressed a palm to the cold, unyielding pane. The stars out there seemed closer to him than Spock did right now – and he knew that if he turned back to those other windows, that looked down upon the men that had done this to Spock, he would not be able to restrain himself from unleashing a truly human anger upon them.

The duties of a captain had never seemed so heavy. It was almost impossible to speak the few necessary words through the intercom to separate those Spock had pointed out from those he had not. That done, he slipped down onto the floor and sat, trying to prise his mind away from the chaos that was swirling inside him, trying to stop himself from running after the Vulcan, from ordering some kind of revenge on the planet below, or just from collapsing into uselessness.

Finally, he stood. The rest of his duties could wait until tomorrow. For now, all he wished for was sleep.

*Pagebreak*


	5. Chapter 5

5.

Spock sat, silent, in the dim light of his cabin, his meditation statue billowing incense into the air. The temperature in the room was a good twenty degrees warmer than the frigidity he had been used to recently, and it melted into his bones like sunshine. The red of the fabric about the walls surrounded him like the softness of a Vulcan sunset. The wood of his chair cradled him as it had every time he had sat here to focus his mind.

And yet – meditation would not come to him.

He clenched his left hand and then relaxed his fingers, trying to ignore the latent stiffness and pain in the unused fingers of his right. Perhaps his inability to form a focus with his hands…

No. He had meditated plenty of times without his fingers steepled before his face. His inability was nothing to do with his surroundings or his broken arm or the aches and soreness in his body that kept manifesting themselves the longer he sat here. It was just – just – that he felt an overriding aversion to turning his thoughts in on himself and really _*examining_* everything that had happened to bring him to this state.

He exhaled, and stood, feeling a hundred tiny twinges in his body as he moved. As careful as McCoy had been in his ministrations, there was very little that he could do to dispel each tiny muscle spasm that came from being closely confined for a month, and then allowed to move as freely as most normal people. Every twinge… That ache in his shoulder that came from lying on his side with his arms taut behind him, the stiffness that tracked up his neck from the same. The long, taut reminders in his thighs of being held in unnatural positions and then the burning soreness of those injuries he had refused to present to the doctor…

He pressed his hand to his mouth, suddenly feeling sick. His knees had lost all of their strength to hold him upright. He was teetering with exhaustion, and he leaned against his cabin divider, feeling like a man of a hundred and eighty. He was alone, so alone…

He sank down onto his bed and lay there, staring at the ceiling above, at the red drapes that crowded down on him. He was hot, and in pain, and exhausted, and alone…

Jim was nearby. He knew that. He could sense him even without reaching out with his mind. But he was a thousand miles away, cut off from him by a glittering, impossible sheet of ice, blurred and distorted and removed from him by – by himself – by his own thoughts, by his own hatred of the current state of his mind. He could not escape from himself, even by merging himself with Jim, even by soothing his thoughts with meditation.

He turned with a weariness so great that it almost prevented even that small movement, and reached into a drawer beside the bed. The tiny bottle in there had been given to him by McCoy, months ago now. The doctor periodically pushed sleeping pills on him, misunderstanding a Vulcan's ability to shun sleep to concentrate on more important matters for a case of insomnia. He never took the pills, but just stored them in his drawer until they reached their expiry date, and then flushed them into the waste system.

Tonight, he shook out two small white tablets into his half-numb right hand, and sat there looking at them as they sat on his palm. Jim had always said that he worshipped Spock's hands… That was the man he was shutting away from himself – the man who traced the lines in his palms with a forefinger, and gave as much attention to his slender fingers and manicured nails as to the rest of his body. That was the difference between that kind of human attention, and the human attention he had been subjected to on the planet below. Those men had reduced him to orifices and organs and specific places that would be vulnerable to as much pain as possible. Jim had treated every millimetre of his skin as if it was Aluvian gold, and held the mind that ruled the body as a thousand times more precious. That was the man he was shutting away from himself…

He closed his eyes, then carefully picked the two pills out of his palm with his other hand, and put them in his mouth, swallowing them without water. He had no urge to change his clothes, to expose more of his body than was necessary. He lay back with his head on his pillow and closed his eyes, and waited for McCoy's miracle to assist him into sleep.

*Pagebreak*

No time seemed to have passed – but there was someone there, standing over him, speaking. Spock blinked, jerking air into his lungs, staring stupidly at the face looking down at him as his mind struggled to catch up. He felt numbed, his thoughts a jumble of meaningless words.

McCoy. After a moment of puzzled staring he saw that it was McCoy, not the leering face of one of the human colonists. He was lying on his bed, fully clothed, and the doctor was looking down at him with an expression of deep concern.

'Since you were overdue for your surgery,' the doctor said, and Spock gained the sense that he was partway through his statement. 'I came down to look for you. Spock? Are you okay?'

He stared for a moment longer, then nodded stiffly. He began to sit up, and the doctor reached out and helped him.

'You were sleeping pretty well – but I guess you must've been exhausted?'

Spock nodded again.

'It – was not easy to sleep during my captivity,' he said awkwardly.

'No, I guess it wouldn't've been,' the doctor said, with the same tone of awkwardness that appeared to be assailing the Vulcan. 'Spock – I don't mean to rush you, but if you can come down to sickbay now…'

Spock blinked slowly, looking around his room, trying to shed the dull feeling that the sleeping pills had left in him.

'Yes, of course,' he said slowly, thinking of getting dressed. Then he looked down at himself, and realised again that he was still in his uniform. 'Yes,' he repeated. 'I am quite ready.'

'Spock, are you okay?' the doctor asked curiously. He held his scanner out towards the Vulcan, and nodded in understanding. 'Diteralzone,' he said. 'You took sleeping pills.'

'I found it difficult to settle my mind for sleep,' Spock said in explanation. 'You had given me the tablets some months ago.'

'Yes, I remember,' the doctor nodded. 'But, Spock, it would have been better for you to consult me first.'

Spock stared up at him. 'The tablets are not dangerous,' he said in a level tone. 'And as far as I am aware they are not contraindicated with any of the medication that you used yesterday.'

'No, that's true,' McCoy said. 'But still…'

Spock stood, and faced the doctor.

'I am quite ready to go down to sickbay,' he said in a more assertive tone. 'I would rather undergo the operation as soon as possible.'

McCoy looked at him for a moment longer, and then nodded, seeming to push aside his concerns for the Vulcan's mental well-being in deference to Spock's reluctance to discuss it.

'All right,' he said finally. 'Like I said, we're all ready for you, Mr Spock – and the sooner we get that arm fixed, the better.'

_*And everything else_,* was the unspoken thought that lingered in his mind as he watched the Vulcan walk through the door. There was little indication but an obvious stiffness in his bearing to reveal the other lingering injuries that must be causing the Vulcan pain – but the doctor knew that they were there, and every professional fibre in his body itched to heal that pain.

*Pagebreak*

Jim knew that Spock would not be awake when he came to the sickbay – but in a way, the captain was glad. Unconscious, Spock could not look at him with that veil of suspicion that categorised him as human, male and uncontrolled before seeing him as _*Jim_*. He hurried along the corridors from his shift pushed by the urge to see that the Vulcan was better – or at least partially better – but an almost equal force dragged at the back of his mind with the knowledge that Spock had very little desire to see him or any other person on this ship full of humans. But for the next hour or so, McCoy had assured him, Spock would be unconscious, and Jim would be able to sit with him in the pretence that his injuries were only physical, and when he opened his eyes it would be with the same warm look of shared appreciation he had favoured Jim with before this past horrendous month.

He sat down next to the Vulcan in the recovery room and curled his fingers about Spock's limp hand, letting the heat of Spock's body seep into his own skin. It gave him a disproportionate level of relief to see that the Vulcan's fingernails were now scrupulously _*clean,_* even if they were still ragged and chipped.

'I had to get them properly clean before the surgery,' McCoy said in a soft voice from behind him, seeing where the captain's eyes were lingering. 'But I thought he'd appreciate it anyway.'

'Yes,' Kirk murmured.

Sparks of Spock's unguarded mind were coming through the light touch between their fingers, like dream-fragments spilling out into another container. Thank god there was no pain or horror there – just tiny shards of the Vulcan's resolute, determined personality brushing into his own mind. It was like a sword returning to its sheath – or perhaps, in deference to Spock's more cerebral nature, a fountain pen slipping back into the lid that protected it. Jim wanted desperately to embrace and protect that sharp, delicate mind that he had grown so used to sharing – but he knew that the instant Spock was conscious it would be withdrawn from him, and he would feel bereft all over again. Asleep, like an exhausted child, Spock was entirely his.

Guilt flooded him again… Asleep equated to helpless… Had that not been Spock's condition in the hands of his captors? Illogical, this guilt – but he was human, and he was illogical.

'You – fixed everything you needed to?' he asked the doctor, not moving his eyes from Spock's face.

'I rebroke the arm – It's not as barbaric as it sounds, Jim,' McCoy said quickly, seeing Kirk's minute flinch at that. 'Just an expression. I just separated the break where it had knitted together, and reset his arm in its natural position. Honestly,' he reassured him. 'It's halfway to healing now. It may take a little longer than a normal break because of what I've had to do, but when it's healed it'll be absolutely fine.'

'And the rest of it?' Kirk asked hesitantly. His eyes were still fixed on Spock's face, but he was thinking of the body that lay beneath the vibrant orange blanket, and what atrocities had been laid upon it. 'How much _*rest of it_* was there?'

'Jim,' the doctor began softly.

'I _*know,_*' Kirk said, with more anger in his voice than he had intended. 'I _*know_* about medical confidentiality. I know about Spock's rights and your responsibilities and everything in-between. Bones, he's my partner, for God's sake. He's as much part of me as my left hand, my feet, my _*guts_*. I've seen that video – now you've seen the results of what happened. I want to know what he suffered and if you've managed to put it right.'

'Jim, I've done what I can,' the doctor began, but Kirk cut across him, caught up in his grief.

'They – strung him up from the ceiling, Bones,' he said, his voice choked as if the words themselves were solid. 'They knocked him around as if he was so much meat, spat on him, humiliated him… It's like – they used him like he was a punchbag – but – the things they did to him you'd never do to a punchbag. I saw – it wasn't clear, but – I could see blood running down his legs, as if they'd – '

'They cut him,' McCoy nodded soberly. 'That was – one of the things they did…'

Jim nodded slowly, trying to force from his mind the image of Spock, hung up under his armpits and thrashing like a fish away from the pain that was being inflicted on him by a cluster of men controlled by anger and testosterone.

'They – mutilated him,' he muttered. 'Didn't they, Bones?'

The doctor sighed. 'To put it succinctly. My scanner showed he'd suffered injury to his genitalia. It didn't show me the extent with that first scan yesterday, and I think if I'd pressed Spock to let me see it would have pushed him over the edge. I just wish he'd _*told_* me then…'

Jim still couldn't keep his eyes from Spock's face.

'Would it have made a difference?' he asked.

McCoy shook his head. 'Medically, no. Most of it was already at least a week old. But – I would rather have taken away that pain sooner than later…'

'You've done what you can now, Bones,' Jim said, shaking his head. It seemed that everyone felt guilt for Spock's torment but the men who had actually inflicted it.

'He – may not recover full function for a while,' the doctor continued awkwardly. No matter how used he was to discussing medical issues it was always different discussing them with a friend – especially discussing one friend's sexual relationship with another.

'I don't think that's going to be an issue,' Kirk said darkly.

McCoy looked at him sharply.

'Jim, Spock is going to be – wary – for a long time, I'm sure,' he said. 'Unless some Vulcan mind discipline I don't know about kicks in, Spock's going to feel a catastrophic mixture of guilt and shame. He'll feel guilty about any inability – mental or physical – to continue a sexual relationship with you, now matter how much you tell him it's all right. But this doesn't have to destroy the two of you.'

'Bones, I don't think he wants any kind of relationship at the moment,' Jim said in a small voice. 'He's barely let me into his room since he got back.'

'Time, Jim,' McCoy said, touching a firm hand to his friend's shoulder. 'Spock's been back on the ship roughly twenty-four hours. I know it feels like forever, but it's nothing in the scheme of things. He will want you, and he will *_need_* you before very long, I promise.'

'I'm not going anywhere,' Jim said, his eyes travelling again over the dark smoothness of Spock's immaculate hair and the pallor of his unconscious face. 'I'm not walking away from him.'

'That's all he needs to know,' the doctor said quietly. 'Be there for him, and he'll come back to you. He won't be able to help it.'

Jim looked round at him, and smiled, making brief contact with the expression of sympathy in those blue eyes. McCoy touched a firm hand to his shoulder, squeezing it gently.

'It's going to be maybe half an hour before he wakes up, Jim,' he said. 'I'll leave you to it – but I need to talk to Spock once he's awake and compos mentis. You know where the buzzer is if you need me.'

'Okay, Bones,' Kirk nodded, his eyes back on Spock's still face. 'Thank you.'

He heard the doctor leave the room, but he did not watch him go. He continued to let his eyes rest on Spock's face, trying to see past the remnants of grazes and bruising to the Vulcan that he had woken up to every morning and gone to sleep with each night. Spock was _*there,_* he knew it. Somehow he must be able to reach beneath the shreds and tatters of psychological damage that were webbed across the Vulcan's mind and coax out the strong and resourceful and caring person beneath.

A sudden memory flashed through his mind – something that he had spent years trying alternately to reconcile himself with and repress. Standing in a crowd on Tarsus 4, and hearing Kolos's voice ringing out to condemn thousands to arbitrary death... The coldness of fear clenching at him… And then afterwards – not the deaths themselves. No – they were clean and civilised and technologically perfect. But – the chaos and carnage left behind in people's minds, the grief so great that it would not take a Vulcan to sense it, the decay and horror of neglected homes and families riven apart and helplessness and hopelessness everywhere. He had felt in those days as if he was walking with a shroud of grief clinging to his body, and he had wanted to turn his mind away from the outside world and hide it somewhere that it could no longer be affected by the thoughts and feelings of everyone else.

'Spock…' he murmured, his hand tightening on those limp fingers.

Spock's grief was small and personal, but it was no less catastrophic. Jim had learned in those days on Tarsus that no matter how many people were sobbing, it was the culmination of the grief in his own mind that really hurt. Misery was a selfish emotion – it could not be any other way.

'Spock, I'm sorry,' he murmured. 'I'm selfish too…'

*Pagebreak*

No time seemed to have passed since Spock had lain down on a bed in sickbay and watched McCoy administer the anaesthetic – but he knew that time must have passed as wakefulness returned, because the bed and his own body and the scent and feel of his surroundings were all different. How much easier it would have been if when that metal bar descended onto his skull in the storage facility he had stayed unconscious until this moment…

He opened his eyes and saw Jim, his eyes staring at him unfocussed, almost as if Jim had fallen asleep with his eyes open whilst waiting for Spock to wake up. He felt the veil lower in his mind again. He had been stared at enough by those – men – those humans who professed to be so fascinated with his alien body. Had everyone's gaze, every future glance, been ruined by those bald, hostile, searching stares?

'Spock,' Jim said, and Spock started, realising that he had lost himself in looking back at Jim, ceasing to see him as that one person whom he loved above all others.

He had fantasised – truly fantasised – about Jim coming to him, when he had been lying in filth and darkness with his hands behind his back. But this – this flesh and blood Jim, made of the same flesh and the same intemperate red blood as those men below – this was different. In fantasy Jim's hands had stroked at his arms and eased his muscles and laid light kisses on his skin. But this Jim was heavy, human, scented with sweat like they were, with that light sheen of oil on his face like they had, with red, red blood being pumped uncontrolled into his cheeks and his chest and every thick, obdurate inch of his skin.

'How long does this have to go on?' Jim asked in a weary tone.

Spock let his eyelids lower. His body seemed to sink further into the bed with Jim's words, as if they had been something heavy settling over him. He could feel Jim's regret at his spontaneous words, but he could not erase them.

'It is not a conscious choice,' he said.

His lips felt stiff as he spoke. His whole body felt different. Stiffer, tighter, but cleaner, and in less pain. But his mind… He was a puppet, broken and then restrung by a master technician – but – he was not the same… McCoy had not performed surgery on his thoughts.

Human… The word was dark in his mind. Those metaphors, those feelings – they were so human. How he wished he could excise that part of himself. He was being attacked from within by human emotion just as much as he had been from without. He thought of the decks above him and the decks below him, and those men confined in rooms in the brig just as he was confined in this one, and overlaying all of that his skin crawled with the sensation of what they had done to him.

He opened his eyes again, and saw Jim's fixed on him.

'I'm sorry,' Jim said, his face softening. 'I'm so sorry, Spock. It's been such a short time. I'm not giving you a chance…

Spock exhaled slowly, feeling the heat of his breath slipping over his lips, trying to rationalise his reaction to Jim's presence.

'I think…' he said slowly, 'I have been trapped in a tunnel… in a cave system… I am trying to reach the exit, but – I am not sure of my route.'

Jim smiled at Spock's unaccustomed use of such a metaphor.

'I know,' he said. 'I want to help you find the exit, Spock.'

Spock shook his head slowly. 'I am – not close enough,' he said awkwardly. 'I have to navigate this particular passage alone. I _*will*_ come back to you, Jim…'

He let his eyes meet Jim's, willing him to understand.

Jim watched him for a moment, and Spock felt a tiny opening, like a minute relaxation in Jim's thoughts, that brought them infinitesimally closer together.

'Do you want me to go?' Jim asked.

Spock shook his head.

They sat in silence. Spock lay still, trying to feel Jim's mind, picking out the strands of concern and caring, and every varied nuance that made that mind _*Jim_* rather than one of those brutal, turned-in, aggressive minds that had come to him during his captivity. The urge to reach out and touch that mind or to reach out and put his arms about that human-cool body was almost overwhelming – but there was always a barrier stopping him, warning him away from touch and everything it meant, warning him away from sharing his damaged thoughts with those clean ones.

Eventually Kirk spoke again.

'I've separated off the men you mentioned, Spock, and we're holding them in the brig. I've – decided to convene a hearing here, on board the ship.'

Spock turned to him, startled. 'Jim, your emotional involvement – '

'We're not married, Spock, or even legally bonded,' Kirk said in a brittle tone. 'There's no conflict of interests as far as the fleet's concerned. And out here I have the right – '

'To exert your own justice,' Spock said flatly. 'Just as they did upon me.'

'_*No,_*' Kirk said fiercely. 'No, Spock. Not just as they did on you. This will be a hearing with three senior officers in a convened court on this starship – not a group of men using rape and torture as a negotiation technique.'

Spock closed his eyes. There was a difference – but on some level, there was no difference…

Three senior officers… Who would that mean? Jim, Commander Scott, and… himself, normally – but obviously not this time. Perhaps McCoy.

'Spock, I'm _*not_* doing this for revenge,' Kirk said in a softer voice. 'I just – want to get this dealt with, and over. Having them here on the ship's causing a lot of tension between us and the colonists. As long as we're hanging here waiting for backup we're vulnerable to any defences they may have. We need to get the issue resolved.'

Spock nodded, but he did not open his eyes. He felt too tired to argue. Everything that had been done to him had already been done, and the consequences to the men who had done it seemed so distant as to be irrelevant.

'Jim,' he murmured.

He reached out his hand, forcing his reticence aside to take hold of Jim's, feeling the softness and familiarity of his fingers. They closed around his as if they were coming to a natural home.

'All right – I'll shut up about that side of it,' Jim smiled. 'I know it's the last thing you want to think about.'

'Yes,' Spock said simply.

He let himself look up into Jim's eyes, trying to see them as he had always seen them, as kind and accepting and full of compassion. They _*were_* like that… They were human eyes, human-hazel and shot through with fragile red veins – but there was a compassion in them that he had despaired to ever see again.

'Spock, Bones wanted – ' Kirk began – but he sensed the wavering of the Vulcan's mind at the same time that Spock's eyes drifted closed, and he pressed his hands closely about Spock's, savouring again that closeness that returned as soon as Spock was unconscious and unguarded.

*Pagebreak*


	6. Chapter 6

6.

Five days…

Spock lay still in the bed, his eyes focussed loosely on the ceiling above, his arms relaxed at his sides now his right was no longer in a sling. It had been, precisely, five days, ten hours, fourteen minutes and fifty-two seconds since he had raised his eyes in the facility in Oakdale to see _*Jim_* standing there in the doorway instead of one of those sub-human men.

Sub-human… He moved the words about in his mind, considering them carefully.

Yes. That was an important phrase. They had ceased to seem entirely human to him. Jim was human. McCoy, with his compassion and desire to heal sickness was human. His mother… Mother, with her unceasing acceptance and comfort to him through the early years of his life – she was human. Those men were – He had to be careful not to demonise them, but they were not quite like all other humans…

He let his mind focus on them, remembering… He remembered being woken from exhausted sleep by a kick to his flank… He remembered the wondering and bewilderment as they laced a rope under his arms and around his chest, and then the understanding as with grunts like stevedores on a dock they hauled him up onto his feet, and then higher until he was dangling, and then lashed the rope to one of the many staples in the floor and ripped his clothing away from him…

His mind stalled, his skin crawling with sensation that he had no desire to remember. Better the sharp, sudden pain of kicks and blows than the touching of curious fingers and the verbal insinuations. Had they known about his relationship with Jim? Had there been some element of punishment for a perceived perversion in their actions, or just punishment for being an invader to their territory? Those curious, malicious touches… The pain of the rope under his arms had been a blessing even as it wrenched his shoulders backwards. It had helped to keep his thoughts nowhere lower than his upper torso – at least for a while.

He forced himself to skim past everything that had occurred at that time. His mind wanted to dwell on it almost as much as he feared dwelling on it. He forced himself onward, just to get past it. There was the sudden relief as his feet were allowed to touch the floor and the wrenching pressure ceased on his arms. His collapse like an empty sack back onto the concrete, and being dragged back to the staple that he was accustomed to be chained to. His clothes being pulled awkwardly back up his legs…

Odd, that… Odd how Jonas always came back to him and reclothed him like a doll, and looked at him as if he regretted what had been done. But… it was the regret of one who steals to satiate an addiction. The sad regret of one who feels guilt over his actions, but has no intent to cease… He was, perhaps, the only one who came to Spock through need rather than anger, and took what he needed, and then regretted it even as he craved more…

He closed his mind to that particular memory. Easier to think of them all as sub-human, as motivated by nothing but anger and violence. Easier to remove any thought of sexual attraction and focus only on blunt, furious aggression…

He looked sideways, and his eyes fell on Jim. It could not be said that they were lying close together, either mentally or physically. There was a space of precisely fifteen point two centimetres between them at their closest point, and Jim's mind was in the depths of dreams, closed to him for now. But they were, at least, both in the same bed.

They were in Jim's room, and he was slightly cold, despite the fact that the temperature was turned up higher than a human would desire, and that Jim was lying in no more than underwear, and that he himself was carefully covered by the orange blanket. He let his eyes travel listlessly down the length of Jim's body. Even in the relaxation of sleep his muscles were taut under his skin. His skin was golden, sheened very lightly with sweat that highlighted each light hair, his chest moving slowly with each breath.

How did Jim manage to sustain such a tan when he spent most of his life under artificial lighting? Spock had never considered that question. True, there was an attempt to make the ship's lighting as close to sunlight – or to Sol-light – as possible – but Jim always managed to look as if he spent his days half-naked under Californian sun rather than clad from neck to toes in uniform in a fully-artificial starship. Perhaps he had looked like that when he was at the Academy, young and bronzed and athletic, without the hardness of experience and duty in his face.

His eyes tracked down to the flatness of Jim's stomach. The skin shivered rhythmically with every slow beat of the human's heart, like the skin of a drum vibrating with unheard sound. The blond hairs there became darker and more coarse, leading down the centre of his body until they tracked under the taut black waistband of his underpants. And then…

Spock's mind momentarily lingered on the contours revealed by that form-fitting fabric – and then turned away, a nausea rising that took a great effort to quell. He knew the full meaning of those raw, blood-flushed turns of flesh beneath. Yes, the clean, trim lines of Jim's body were different to those ill-formed, slovenly men who had held him captive – but – Everything condensed into raw, hurried actions, guttural noises in the throat and those quick, urgent, biological thrusts… With Jim they were initiated by love, and love stayed him and controlled him even as he lost himself in biological need. With those men they had been initiated by anger, by the need to dominate and punish a male that threatened them… But still, it all condensed down to those urgent thrusts and those guttural sounds, to clenching fingers and hot breaths and sweat tracking down flushed skin, and everything focussed into pain in one place…

He caught his breath, catching hold of his runaway thoughts as memory threatened to overcome him. Jim never caused him pain. Jim was different to them. He was _*different…_*

Spock rolled away, and very quietly and carefully slipped out of the bed. He had been there for a little over two hours, watching Jim sleep. It was more than he had managed before this night. He stood for a moment, his eyes on the wall, not daring to turn his gaze back to the human lest he see the wrong thing. Then he took a shallow breath, closed his fingers into his palms, and left the room.

*Pagebreak*

He stood in the corridor that faced the cells of the brig, in the utter quiet of ship's night. There was a guard at the end of the corridor, seated behind a desk, listlessly reading something on his screen that Spock suspected was nothing to do with his job. Spock glanced at him for a moment, wondering how much he knew of what the men he guarded had done. He had not shown any deep knowledge of what had occurred in his reaction to Spock's presence. He had spoken quietly and respectfully in response to the Vulcan's request to enter the brig, but with none of that duality between surface and inner thoughts that Spock had noticed in those who *_did*_ know. Perhaps if he had known he would have watched the Vulcan more closely – but Spock had no intention of doing anything foolish as he stood looking through those force-field-sheened doors. He was simply – observing.

The prisoners were asleep, just like most of alpha shift. They lay in the narrow bunks in their solitary confinement under identical orange blankets to the one that Spock himself had been lying under until a few minutes ago. Their breathing was easy and slow, just like Jim's. Their chests rose and fell with the same rhythm and each breath left their lips with the same soft, sighing sound. Their faces were relaxed like children's. There was no sign, in sleep, that any thought of sadism or harm or anger had ever flitted through their minds, let alone been unleashed in furious reality upon a living being.

Spock closed his eyes momentarily. He must had looked like that at times, when they had come into the room where he lay. They must have looked down on him and dismissed any suggestion of innocence and kicked him out of sleep and –

He swallowed and turned away. He nodded at the guard with veiled eyes and a rigid expression as he left the brig, and turned back down the corridors towards officers' quarters. Coming down here had achieved nothing. He had not separated these men further from Jim in his mind – he had merely reinforced their similarities. It was best to stay away from them as far as possible. They only incited emotion in him that he had no desire to deal with.

When he returned to bed, he returned to his own bed instead of Jim's, and turned over into comfortable solitude in Vulcan-normal warmth, with his door carefully locked behind him.

*Pagebreak*

Seven days…

His life felt split into two uneven parts. He had been back on the ship forever, his life before Oakdale and after Oakdale sealing together like a thin patch of skin over a rotting wound, and the time between sitting there in his mind, festering, continuing to pain him no matter how skilfully he tried to cover the signs of infection. No matter how hard he tried to rationalise what had happened his mind curled away from those events like leaves from a fire, and he could not force himself to examine them. Instead the memories haunted him like a hated enemy always standing behind one shoulder, like a whisper that he half caught in his ear whichever way he turned.

He was walking the corridors of the ship with a continuous feeling of distraction teasing at him. He knew that down on one of the decks below him a court was convened, that he had elected to absent himself from. Captain Kirk and Commander Scott and Commander Giotto were perhaps watching extracts from that security tape at this very moment. It had been necessary, he knew, for Dr McCoy to not be part of the trio of judges. Dr McCoy's role in the trial was the giving of evidence, not the judgement of that evidence. But – he would have felt himself more easy were it someone other than the very human Giotto who made up the third behind that oval table.

The security tape… Images flashed before him. Their precise angle and cast must have been created by his own mind, since he saw himself in those images, and he had not watched the tape himself. He had been the star performer rather than the director. It was hard to bear the thought of that tape being watched by anyone…

He almost bumped into someone, and he murmured an apology, taking in little more than the colour of the uniform. He passed into the elevator and closed his hand around the control handle.

'Bridge,' he said distractedly, and the elevator moved smoothly upwards.

He was not technically on duty, but it had seemed logical to him to reintroduce himself to his duties by taking care of some small matters that had been left unfinished with his abrupt capture five weeks ago. He had not been on the bridge since that time, and while he knew his replacement was perfectly capable of covering his duty to an adequate standard there were still a few small things that only he could deal with.

The doors opened onto a pitch of excitement that immediately focussed his scattered thoughts. It could not be said that there was panic, or even raised voices – but it was obvious that _*something_* of significance was occurring. Instincts leapt to him that papered over the numb distraction that had previously had hold of his mind.

'Report, Commander,' he snapped, and the human at the centre of the bridge turned to him, apparently startled at his unexpected presence.

'A small vessel approaching from the planet, sir,' Commander Saunders replied concisely. 'They're demanding that we release the men we're holding here.'

Spock's mind and body seemed to galvanise at those words, his eyes instantly picking out the tiny vessel on the viewscreen despite the confused backdrop of atmosphere and land and sea that made up the planet beyond.

'Fire on it, Lieutenant,' he said, taking a step forward toward the helm and the man who sat there.

'We can deploy a tractor beam to repulse them,' Commander Saunders said calmly. 'They don't have weaponry to speak of.'

'Their entire ship is a weapon,' Spock countered. 'Once they are within the shields of this ship they can practically do as they wish.'

'There's almost no way they can get through the shields of this ship,' Saunders responded, his calm putting Spock's prickling state of alertness to shame.

'It is quite possible for a small enough vessel to identify a weakness in the shields and enter through it,' Spock said in a brittle voice.

His mind seemed to be racing three steps ahead of his movements – or was it three steps behind? His rationality and his response to the danger were vastly out of line, his logical assessment of the threat struggling to catch up with the instinctive need to repel this danger.

'But, surely, sir, a handful of farmers from a colony planet wouldn't have the tactical nous to – '

Saunder's light, dismissive tone seemed to break something within Spock's mind. He wheeled on the commander, his voice rising above its normal level.

'I am the first officer of this ship! That vessel is a threat! Fire on it!'

He turned back to the helm, barely registering the bewildered look on the helmsman's face.

'Fire, Lieutenant!' Spock snapped.

_*His chest was tightening. His mind and his body seemed wrapped in swaddling._*

'But, sir,' the helmsman began. 'That ship's just a – '

'I said _*fire,_*' Spock repeated, and the brittle crack of his voice surprised even himself. It seemed to come from beyond his own ears. He could see the man hesitating still, and he stepped forward and clamped the fingers of his left hand at the junction of the man's neck and shoulder in one unthinking movement, pressing the button to fire with his right in the same fluid action.

Time had concertinaed – and now it stretched out, the vivid blue beams arcing from beneath the saucer section like light trails at night, delicately stretching until they touched the approaching ship and cracked it like an egg.

And time snapped back to normal, a medley of human voices on the bridge snapping, 'They're exposed to vacuum! Get the transporter room. Beam them aboard. Quickly! Security. No, the doctor. No. Get the captain up here.'

Spock was still staring in numbness at the screen when he heard the tight, tension-laden voice of Jim, cutting through the varied noises on the bridge to say, 'Commander Spock, with me. Now.'

Spock felt his spine contract. Everyone else on the bridge could hear the captain's displeasure – but he could feel it too, like a whip cracking against his skin, resonating through the pathways of his mind. He caught up his hands behind his back, turned, and walked up to the turbolift without letting his eyes meet Jim's.

With perfect precision, Jim's anger erupted the moment that the doors closed.

'_*No_* amount of personal favour will allow me to overlook an incident like that, Commander,' he said. His voice seemed to slice into Spock's chest. 'You've assaulted a bridge officer. Civilians could have died on that ship. Would you care to explain to me exactly what happened?'

Spock moved his feet on the floor, trying to bridge an unusually long gap between a question being asked of him and the answer being formulated in his mind. After a dragging moment of blankness in his mind he had to admit to himself and to Jim, 'I have no rational explanation.'

Kirk sighed, and the rigid anger that was holding his entire body seemed to melt away.

'Do you – have an irrational one, Mr Spock?' he asked in a softer voice, turning the handle on the lift wall so that it stopped in its tracks.

'I – ' Spock faltered, looked down at the grey carpet, and looked up again at Jim, and his so-human face, and the plea in his eyes for some kind of explanation that would make this easier. 'I – was afraid,' he realised slowly. 'Not a rational fear. But – I was afraid.'

'Spock…' Jim said on an outbreath, his voice a wave of forgiveness that made Spock want to fall forward against his chest. 'Spock, I can't let this go,' he said, recovering a little authority again.

'No. I – quite understand that,' Spock said in a low voice.

'It's going to go through the medical division rather than the security one,' he continued gently.

As Spock looked up at him Kirk laid a hand on his arm, and said, 'Spock, I'm worried about you. Bones is too. It's understandable that you have – issues – from what happened to you. But they need dealing with before you can become a functioning officer on this ship again.'

Spock took in a tiny breath, and then nodded, keeping his head bowed.

'But not here,' he said. 'Not within Starfleet. If it is allowable, I will – go to Vulcan.'

'_*Anything_* that will help you,' Jim said, the relief like a breaking wave in his voice. 'Anything. I'll take leave too. I'll come with you…'

'No,' Spock said quietly, his eyes on the floor. Then he looked up again, and said, 'No, Jim. I must go alone.'

Jim's eyes contacted with his, and he took a small step forward even as the acceptance of Spock's need registered in his gaze. Something about that acceptance seemed to melt a final barrier in the Vulcan's mind, and he stepped forward himself, falling against Jim's chest and letting his head sink onto his shoulder, letting the cool of his body soothe the heat in his own.

'It will be all right, Spock,' Jim said.

His voice was barely audible, but it travelled through the bones and flesh of his chest and into Spock's ear where it pressed firmly against the base of his neck. Spock closed his eyes, using every method that he had ever learnt to block those memories that haunted him and focus only on the now and the here, on the solidity and acceptance of Jim's body, and the feeling of his hands spread out on his back and curving over his shoulders as if they were stopping him from falling.

'I – do not know how long I will need,' Spock murmured.

'I need you back, Spock,' Jim said. 'I _*want_* you back. Whatever it takes. However long it takes. As long as you come back.'

Spock relaxed another degree, letting his hands feel Jim's own shoulderblades and the solid flesh that covered them and the regular beat of blood deep within his chest.

'I will come back,' he promised. 'I have no other home.'


	7. Chapter 7

Credit for the passage 'Spock, there are humans that evolve and humans that seem not to ... is one of those humans.' goes to pandora-skye on deviantart

[A.N. I am getting very annoyed at this website deleting the pagebreaks I put in. I use asterisks – it deletes them. I've tried dashes, I've tried arrows, it deletes them. I *do* have pagebreaks in my story to separate scenes, honestly!]

7.

Spock remembered running like a hunted animal through a field of wheat, cold rain peppering his skin. But the plants that surrounded him now were almost chest high, of a red-purple hue. Their stalks and leaves had the smooth, reflective surfaces of a plant accustomed to holding on to whatever water it could until the next rains came. The sun that beat down on his skin was the welcome blaze of 40 Eridani, and the sandy soil beneath his feet was the soil of home.

He had walked into the field deliberately, but he was not certain why. Perhaps he was trying to recapture something of those last moments before his life had changed, trying to remind himself that there had been a *before* as well as an *after*. Perhaps he was poking a blunt stick into a wound, trying to find out exactly how much it hurt. Whatever the reason, he was here, surrounded by swaying leaves, with the differences and similarities to that other situation washing about him like currents in water.

*Idic,* he thought to himself. There were infinite fields of crops on infinite planets, and infinite bipedal creatures striding into them right at this moment for infinite different reasons. It did not have to end how it had ended for him.

He pushed his way onward until he came to a place where the bedrock pushed through the thin soil in a soft, sand-scoured swell like a whale breaking the surface of the sea.

He had ducked into this field numerous times when he was a child. He had become invisible, when he was small and the crops were higher than his head, and he had been able to pick his way without disturbing the leaves to that place in the field where this rock lay. He sat there now, eyes closed, remembering the taunting calls of his classmates on the road nearby and how he had tried to close his mind down to the wincingly cruel things they had said about him and his family. And then his mind moved until he was kneeling in that other field, rain spattering onto his back, and the shouts were of adult men hunting him down.

He closed his eyes more tightly, rationalising the memory, telling himself that those men had no more power to harm him now than did the children of his youth. Memories were memories, nothing more. Ghosts of the past. Distorted fragments of what had happened and was no longer happening. He allowed himself to feel his body, remembering the ghosts of pain and invasion, and then feeling with more force the absence of pain in a body that had now been healed.

He took in a deep breath, feeling it fill his lungs. He was whole, complete in himself, self-contained. His mind was under his own control.

He exhaled, feeling a degree of the anxiety and pain leave his body with the breath, feeling the rigidity and security of mental control soothing his mind. He had only spent fifteen hours so far in close consultation with his assigned Healer, but he could already feel the benefits. His memories were still as vivid, but his ability to process them without emotion was slowly increasing.

'Spock.'

He concealed a start before it reached his muscles, and opened his eyes. Sarek was standing in front of him. He looked up, letting his eyes travel over the dark solidity of his father's clothing before allowing his own gaze to meet Sarek's. His father had always had the most penetrating of gazes. Spock knew that Sarek could not – or at least *would not* - read what was passing through his mind – but that knowledge did little to ease his instinctive feeling that Sarek was aware of every layer of thought that clustered in his mind.

Neither his father nor his mother knew precisely why he was here. They knew he was troubled – that much was obvious. But only the Healer that Spock saw daily knew the precise reasons for this sudden period of leave on Vulcan. His parents were curious, but so far they had respected Spock's request for privacy, and had asked him nothing.

'Your mother was concerned,' Sarek said smoothly, his eyes unwavering on Spock's own.

Spock tilted an eyebrow in question, and was rewarded by the smallest sign of discomfort in his father as he shifted his weight from foot to foot.

'She observed your entry to this field,' Sarek continued in explanation. 'Your mother believes – taking into account past observations – that this means you are distressed.'

Spock inclined his head briefly, then stood up, carefully brushing dust from his clothing. Sarek was obviously made uncomfortable by the suggestion of distress – but it was just as obvious that he knew his wife might be correct.

Spock opened his mouth minutely, about to respond – but then he pressed his lips together again, and said after a moment, 'I was about to return home. I will let mother know there is no need for concern.'

Sarek nodded, and stepped aside, allowing Spock to pass him to push into the mass of leaves and stalks. Spock's discomfort at having the presence of another so close behind him was momentarily and quickly rationalised and suppressed, a mere flicker in his mind.

They walked in silence, their pace necessarily slowed by the rough ground and the tangled crops. But finally Sarek said, 'Is it your intention to explain your presence here, Spock?'

Spock turned his head slightly, not quite looking round, and then continued onward through the field.

'My presence on Soltek's land?' he asked innocently. 'I was assured by him thirty years ago that it would not be taken as trespass. He has never rescinded that permission.'

'You are very well aware that is not what I mean,' Sarek said with a slight edge to his voice. 'You have come to our house, and we welcomed you without question.'

'This is not *without question,*' Spock pointed out.

His father exhaled, a noise that would have been attributed to annoyance in a human.

'You are visiting a Healer who specialises in the treatment of mental trauma,' Sarek continued solidly.

'That is true,' Spock said, his voice devoid of inflection.

'Do you intend to honour your parents with any information as to what has happened to their son?' Sarek asked, the edge in his voice becoming a little sharper.

Spock closed his eyes for the briefest of moments before pushing on through the crops. They were nearly at the edge of the field now, where the light winds caused sand to scud across the road and the heat of the sun reflected back off the ground as if it was striking a mirror. He inhaled the hot, dusty air as he stepped out onto the hard road surface, letting the warmth of it spread through his lungs.

'I was held hostage for a month by human terrorists,' he said finally, still not looking round.

'And you were – tortured?' Sarek hazarded, his voice very controlled.

Spock's shoulderblades tightened.

'I do not wish to speak further on the matter,' he said flatly.

'I see,' Sarek said after a long pause.

Spock could feel that his father's tension had eased, just a little.

'It – is enough to know that your troubles occurred in the line of duty,' Sarek continued. 'Your mother had been concerned – ' Uncharacteristically, he trailed off.

Spock turned, surprised. 'Mother had been concerned - ?' he prompted. It was unusual for Sarek to leave a sentence uncompleted.

'No matter,' Sarek said, his eyes veiled. 'It is not of consequence.'

Spock regarded him steadily for a moment, wondering what it was that Sarek had left unspoken.

'Are you certain of that, Sarek?' he asked. 'Your tone would suggest otherwise.'

That statement, Spock knew, came very close to an insult to a Vulcan practised in emotional control. He also knew that the best way to elicit information from his father was to irritate it out of him.

'You keep your private life – extremely private – even from your parents,' Sarek said tangentially.

Spock's eyebrow spasmed briefly upwards, suddenly aware of the reason behind his father's extreme awkwardness. Spock's private life, outside of his own thoughts and feelings, contained very little – except for Jim… Sarek would never expect him to discourse at length about the internal musings of his mind. He would, however, expect his son to discuss family business, within the family – and his relationship with Jim constituted family business.

He pursed his lips, his eyes on the road ahead rather than on his father. In the distance the dust whipped up by the wind had the effect of blurring the reddish ground into the reddish sky, and the view had the appearance of being endless.

He had known that this moment would come eventually – but he had no desire for it to come now. Same-sex relationships were not unknown on Vulcan. Vulcans did not have terms for different sexual preferences, since a relationship carried out within the bounds of logic was simply a relationship, no matter what the gender of the participants. There was considerable logic in same-sex partnerships – especially to a race with a biological imperative to bond and mate despite many varied reasons for wishing to avoid the procreation of children. Vulcan was a harsh planet to survive upon, and before its people had clambered out of a life of subsistence farming overpopulation was a very real risk to societies struggling against drought and famine, whereas secure, childless couples were a boon to the community.

Those facts not withstanding, Spock had never found an opportune moment to tell his father that he was engaged in a fully bonded relationship with the human captain of his ship. No matter how accepting Vulcan as a whole was of same-sex relationships, he had no illusion that Sarek, ever critical of unconventionality, would accept the news with equanimity.

'There is very little in my private life that would be of relevance to you,' he said finally.

'Of course,' Sarek said.

His gaze, as ever, was penetrating, but Spock ignored its scrutiny and walked on towards the house. He was aware that this was a discussion that would have to take place, eventually – but he had no intention of sharing it with his father before telling his mother.

*Pagebreak*

The images flickered on the screen far faster than it would be possible for a human to read, but Spock's eyes took them in with ease, his brain processing multiple streams simultaneously. It was not possible to perform a detailed analysis of the various news-streams that were playing before him, but Samek, his Healer, had not set the exercise for that purpose. Spock's only concern was to register the gist of each story and process his emotional reaction to it rather than to garner a detailed understanding of every individual case.

An archive image of Tarsus 4 flickered before his eyes, and he closed them, momentarily shaken by the personal impact of that scene.

'Computer, halt,' he said, and the images froze, blurred halfway through a fade from one to the next. 'Rewind through fourteen images,' he said, and the computer silently and obediently took him back to the story of Tarsus.

He leaned forward, taking in the image and the attendant close-packed paragraphs of print – the fashions of over twenty years ago, the bewildered, emaciated population, the descriptions of sufferings visited upon humans by humans. It was all familiar to him, through the veil of Jim's mind. He had not been on Tarsus at that time, but he had shared a little of Jim's reaction to his own suffering.

'Humans…' he murmured.

This, presumably, was why Samek had told him to only consider each image briefly. The aim was to reconcile him to humans through their full spread of goods and evils, to remind him that what had happened to him was neither unique nor common, but simply something that happened. There were at least as many positive stories as negative in the images he had been studying – precisely sixty-four percent positive, the analytical part of his brain corrected him.

'Your mother is a human,' said a soft voice from behind him. 'And you are half human.'

It was all Spock could do not to jump. He briefly wondered why he had not shut the door to his room – a shut door was as good as a lock on Vulcan. But no matter. He had not shut it, and his mother had come into his room without him realising, and had heard that one sighed word.

He turned the screen off, then looked round, and nodded.

'Those closest to us are often exempt from classification in our minds,' he said as his mother sat on the edge of his bed.

'Oh, you do classify me, Spock,' she said with a smile. 'But you classify me as 'mother' – and that excuses me from many evils.'

'I am not certain you have ever committed an evil,' Spock said honestly.

'Well, misdeeds, then,' she conceded. 'Like coming into my son's room without knocking. Like being concerned no matter how much you tell me not to be. Like – asking you now what it is that makes you say *humans* in that way, as if that entire race of beings has let you down.'

'I thought I had explained to you – ' Spock began, with a sense of impatience creeping over him. Every fresh mentioned of what had happened made him feel naked and exposed.

'You explained that a small number of human men did some – terrible things to you,' she said, with obvious difficulty at having to consider any such harm happening to her son. 'And I understand that you don't want to tell me exactly what they did. I'm not asking you to tell me exactly what they did. But – there's something more, Spock. You're looking at all humans and seeing what those few men did, aren't you? That's not like you. It's not like you to not be able to separate the one from the many.'

Spock closed his eyes, shaking his head.

'I – don't know, mother,' he admitted tiredly. 'I don't know why I have such trouble separating the one from the other…'

'You had to leave your ship because of it,' Amanda reminded him.

'Yes,' Spock nodded, his tone a little more terse.

'Spock – ' She opened her mouth, then shut it again, as if reconsidering her wording. Then she began again. 'Spock, you are my son. I can't say I understand you completely. Some people think that mothers have a magic key into their sons' minds, and I don't believe that's true. But – would you permit me to – hazard a guess?'

Spock looked up at his mother, at the concern in her eyes and the hesitancy in her face. He clasped his hands together, summoning a barrier of protection in his mind against whatever difficult subject his mother was about to broach, and nodded slowly.

'Your guesses are often sound,' he said.

'Spock, you are very close to your captain, aren't you?' she asked.

Involuntarily Spock's gaze fell, and he felt a heat coming into his cheeks.

'I – believe – you have surmised I am more than that,' he said, his voice little more than a murmur.

'Spock…'

In the periphery of his vision Spock saw her hand move towards him, and she wrapped her fingers around his, stroking the backs of his fingers with hers. For a brief moment he was transported back to multiple moments of his childhood – waiting to enter the building on his first day at school, and numerous other small, nervous moments – and the feeling of his mother's fingers discreetly stroking his, imparting a reassurance that other Vulcan children did not seem to need.

He looked up, and saw that his mother was smiling. There was no disappointment or dismay in her face. A relief that he had not realised he was waiting for washed through his body at the look on her face.

'Why didn't you tell us, Spock?' she asked him. 'Did you expect us to be anything other than happy for you?'

'I – am uncertain of what I expected,' Spock admitted. 'I am still uncertain of what I expect from Sarek.'

There was a moment's hesitation, then she said, 'Well – Sarek, we can deal with later. But Spock – I have drawn my own assumptions as to what those men did to you. I won't ask you if I'm wrong or right. But – is it possible that you are focussing on the ills of *all* humans because you are wary of comparing those men too closely to James Kirk?'

'It – is ridiculous to believe I could compare them to – him,' Spock said instantly, a little too quickly.

'Is it, Spock?' she asked. 'Is it really ridiculous to believe that you are afraid admitting that the one person you have let beyond your defences is a man just like those other men? Isn't it easier to believe that a whole species is bad than to focus your fear on the one person who is closest to you?'

Spock let his head fall, his eyes staring at his hands, and at the pink tinted fingers of his mother smoothing over the olive of his own skin.

'I – could not bear to lose him,' he said, his voice surprising even himself by coming out as a half-choked whisper.

'You will not lose him,' his mother said with a rare steel in her voice, her hand tightening on his. 'As long as you let yourself get through this, you will not lose him.'

'When I see him, I see them,' Spock said, his voice continuing in a whisper.

The pain in his throat was a familiar one – he had had countless conversations with his mother in this room as a child, with the pain of tears he refused to release lodging in his throat. But things had changed so much since then…

'Spock, there are humans that evolve and humans that seem not to,' his mother said softly, wrapping her other hand around his. 'We're a young race – we're still on the cusp of understanding. But amongst us there are a great few who have reached further than the rest, grasping out at something better than we have now, seeking to sow and cultivate the best in humanity. I can't pretend that I know him as well as you do, but I believe that James Kirk is one of those humans.'

Spock raised his head, his eyes curiously misted with moisture.

'Acknowledge that he *could* be like them,' his mother said. 'And then you will be able to acknowledge that he is *not* like them. Each human – each Vulcan, each Andorian or Rigelian – is utterly unique. Cruelty isn't a human thing. It's a personal thing. Would he ever intentionally hurt you?'

'He – has saved me, countless times,' Spock admitted. 'He saved me this time…'

He remembered that moment of looking up, of seeing Jim standing there, and despair collapsing into relief. In that brief moment he had harboured no thought of Jim being like those men. He had been a saviour.

'Samek – did not ask me to consider this,' he said eventually.

'Perhaps Samek didn't expect *love* to enter the equation,' his mother reminded him softly.

'No,' Spock said. He looked up, meeting his mother's eyes. 'No, perhaps he did not… Mother, would you leave me?' he asked carefully. 'I require – time to meditate.'

Her hand pressured harder on his for a moment, and then she smiled, and let go.

'Of course, Spock,' she said. 'Take all the time you need. You know where I'll be.'

'In your garden,' Spock nodded.

She smiled again. 'In the kitchen, making *lak-toi,*' she corrected him. 'I think later on you and your father and I will need to sit down to talk, and we all know sharing *lak-toi* makes the process much pleasanter.'

Spock allowed a hint of a smile onto his lips.

'That is very true,' he nodded. 'I will come find you, when I am ready.'

His mother got to her feet, touching Spock briefly on the shoulder before leaving the room. Spock gazed after her for a long moment, then suddenly realised he had been staring profitlessly at the shut door for almost a minute. He shook himself, clenching his hands together, then stretching out his fingers.

He switched the computer screen back on, and the image of Tarsus flickered into life again. He let his eyes rest on it again, seeing the faces of the survivors. They were many, blurred and poorly resolved in the small image – but he could still read the swathe of emotions that were obviously passing through their minds. A few had a blank look of repressed shock that he could easily identify with, but many were pouring their emotions out without shame.

Jim had been one of that crowd… A small, young, unprotected Jim, caught on Tarsus by the most unfortunate chance of his life, and only an order away from an unceremonious death. The young and weak, the sick and abandoned, had been the first to suffer in Kodos's carefully worked out solution. One slightly altered decision, and his Jim would have been halted in his life at the age of thirteen, and Spock's universe would have been a very different place.

He shut down Samek's programme, and switched the terminal from computer function to communicator function. He opened a channel, inputting the correct codes and permissions without conscious thought. The screen remained blank for precisely fifteen point three seconds – and then it flickered into life, and that so-familiar face appeared, warmed with a smile.

'Jim,' Spock said simply.

He did not need to say more than that. Without even waiting for expansion Jim said, 'I've already got the permission, Spock. I just need to hand some things over to Scotty, and then I'll be in the Copernicus ready to leave. It's only fifteen hours from here by shuttle.'

Spock closed his eyes very briefly, covering a swell of emotion that was threatening to reach the surface. Then he nodded.

'I anticipate your arrival, Jim,' he said. Then he cut the communication. The meditation he had proposed a few minutes ago would be sorely needed. He thought it would probably be the most important time of reflection in his life.


	8. Chapter 8

8.

There was silence about the kitchen table. Spock sat looking down at his clasped hands, noting each crease in the skin of his thumbs and curled fingers, and how his previously ragged nails were now neat and clean, and the last scars from small scrapes and cuts had faded away. His body was almost entirely healed now. Almost… There were still significant injuries that would take time to heal, but they were healing. They were healing faster than his mind was. But his mind, too, was healing. If it was not he would not have had the courage to be sitting here preparing to speak candidly to his father, and Jim would not be on a ship bound for Vulcan.

'Spock,' Sarek prompted him finally. His cup of *_ahnek*_ sat untouched. He was holding a broken off shard of *_lak-toi_* - a brittle, sweet, nutty delicacy – between his fingers – but that too was as yet untasted.

Spock unclasped his hands, and settled them lightly around his own drink, letting the heat pass through the ceramic of the mug and into his skin and bones. He looked sideways, meeting his mother's reassuring gaze. She smiled, and nodded subtly.

The easiest way to speak about this would be quickly and directly, Spock resolved. At least it would be easier – far easier – than telling Sarek what had happened during his month in Oakdale. It was, in human vernacular, the lesser of two evils.

'You have been anxious that I choose a bondmate since T'Pring's rejection of me,' he said, his words coming swiftly, but with precise control. 'I have chosen one.'

Sarek's demeanour lightened a little.

'I am gratified,' he said. Then his brows contracted. 'Your manner indicates an unsuitable choice.'

Spock pressed his lips together. 'The choice is suitable for me,' he said.

'She is human,' Sarek intuited, and Amanda's face spasmed oddly.

'_*He_* is human,' Spock corrected quietly.

Sarek's face became carved of stone. All emotion had apparently drained from his body – but the _*lak-toi_* in his hand splintered, and scattered over the table.

'He is of good standing,' Spock continued as if he had not noticed Sarek's reaction. 'He is of age, honourable, relatively wealthy, and successful in his chosen field. And yes, he is human.'

Amanda silently swept up the scattered crumbs with her hand, and left them in a small pile at the edge of the table, but her gaze was narrowly focussed on her husband's face. Sarek still appeared very calm – years of being ambassador to Vulcan would ensure that even if his Vulcan disciplines did not – but she was aware of the turmoil beneath the surface as he attempted to reconcile a stubborn adherence to tradition with a desire for his son's happiness.

'He is Captain James Kirk of the starship _Enterprise_,' Spock continued calmly.

'Of course,' Sarek said in a monotone, but to those who knew him as well as Spock and Amanda did it was obvious that there was a world of fevered activity in his mind, behind the impassive façade. 'And – you have already bonded?'

'It is a long-term relationship, Sarek,' Spock nodded. 'Neither of us intend to dissolve the bond at any time.'

Sarek was silent for a long time, his hands folded before him on the table as if he was making an effort not to clench them together. Then he asked, 'And the men who attacked you – it is not difficult to surmise their mode of attack from your reaction to it. Were they aware of this relationship?'

Spock stiffened, his fingers tightening on his mug until the heat burnt him. A hurt fury had bloomed inside him at Sarek's words. His only option was to remove himself from this situation before that fury was teased out of him. He put the vessel down with great care on the table, then stood and left the room.

'Sarek,' he heard Amanda said reproachfully, but whatever his father's reply, if he even made one, was lost as Spock shut the front door of the house behind him.

. . . . . .

'Sarek,' Amanda said softly, long after the outside door had closed. There was no reproach in her voice now.

Neither of them had moved since Spock had left the room, but now Sarek raised his eyes, and favoured her with the most subtle of smiles.

'I know, my wife,' he said, and she could not but help smile in return.

Sarek's voice spoke of warm fires and comfort and security to her, and even at times like this she felt immensely reassured just by his stolid presence. She had never lost that feeling of being twenty-five in the face of a seventy year old – although where Spock was concerned she was capable of feeling far older and more mature than her centenarian husband.

'What do you know?' she asked him softly.

She was very aware of the cast of his feelings through their ever-present bond, but the human in her – and the teacher in her – preferred her husband to sometimes state his opinions aloud.

He favoured her with a subtle smile.

'I know it is enough that Spock is content. I know there should be no other consideration than his health and wellbeing.'

'But – ' Amanda prompted him.

'But – I had hoped for the heir to the house of Surak to make a conventional choice,'

'Like you did?' she asked him lightly.

'My choice – was logical. I was Ambassador to Earth. Interplanetary relations – '

'Psh,' she interrupted him with a wave of her hand. 'You fell in love, Sarek, just as Spock has.'

Sarek tilted his head minutely to one side. She knew it was the only concession that she would get, but it was enough.

'I had hoped for grandchildren,' Sarek continued.

That too was dismissed with a wave of her hand.

'That's quite possible in this day and age.' A soft smile came over her face. 'I think they'd make beautiful children.'

'Perhaps,' Sarek acknowledged, then said more firmly, 'Yes, Amanda. If what we produced is any indication, then I am sure that the match of human and Vulcan would be an acceptable one.'

'_*That_* human and _*that_* Vulcan,' she amended softly.

After a small pause, Sarek nodded. 'That human, and that Vulcan. Kirk has shown himself to be a character of great integrity – if a little volatile…'

'We humans *_are*_ volatile,' Amanda reminded him. 'But – not as volatile as Vulcans can be.'

'No,' Sarek conceded again. So many more of his arguments with his wife ended with concession than did those of his job.

'Then – will you let Spock know all of this?' she asked him cautiously. If Sarek was going to stick on any point, it would be on the revelation of his feelings to his son.

'I will speak to him when he decides to return,' Sarek nodded.

The emphasis on the word _*decides_* was not lost on Amanda. She was very familiar with Sarek's subtle judgements on her son's conduct.

'Sarek,' she asked after a moment, recalling precisely what her husband had said to make Spock leave the room. 'You said it wasn't difficult to surmise their mode of attack on Spock. What did you mean by that?'

Sarek levelled his dark eyes on hers. His shielding became palpably stronger. Finally he said, 'I believe that Spock was raped.'

Something inside Amanda seemed to crumple, as if a hand had reached inside her chest and crushed what it found there. A hardness built in her throat, and she clenched her hands, trying to control her reaction in front of Sarek.

'Are – you certain?' she asked when she felt she had control of her voice.

Sarek shook his head minutely. 'I cannot be certain unless Spock himself tells me so. My hypothesis is based on his reaction, his choice of Healer, and the common behaviour of human males in situations such as his. Spock had attempted to remove them from their territory. They would feel it necessary to reassert their masculinity over him.'

'Is – that all you see it as?' she asked, a tremor finally making its way through into her voice, grief for Spock transposing into anger at her husband. 'A psychological case study? Nothing more than a bundle of primitive reactions?'

Sarek's eyes closed briefly. His mental shields were still veiling his mind, but his hurt was obvious.

'No,' he said finally. 'I see it as far more than that, my wife. But – I cannot speak of it.'

'And you felt it necessary to needle him on this?' she asked him sharply, the anger still trembling through her frame.

There was a momentary raise of an eyebrow, but Sarek was familiar enough with his wife's language to understand the metaphor.

'I was not _*needling_* him,' he said, shaking his head slowly. 'Perhaps it was misplaced curiosity, or a desire to understand. You believe this is difficult for you, Amanda. It is difficult for me too.'

'It's difficult for _*Spock._*'

'Yes,' he nodded. 'Far more difficult than either of us could imagine. But an emotional reaction from his parents will not aid him.'

Amanda clenched her hands on the table, then got to her feet and prepared to leave the room. She understood the truth of Sarek's words, but at this moment she felt needed to be alone in order to satisfy the very human emotional reaction that was churning inside her, and to do that it would be best for all to remove herself from Sarek's presence.

'Amanda,' Sarek said gravely just as she began to move from the table.

She almost felt inclined to ignore him – but instead she turned back to him, and waited for him to speak. Instead, he merely fixed her eyes with his, and then reached out a hand. After a moment of hesitation she smiled, and took it, and felt his calm flowing into her, and then his rigidly controlled emotions below that calm, and the sea of discord that his realisation had conjured in him.

'Sarek,' she began, but he shook his head.

'Meld with me, Amanda,' he said in a low voice. 'And together we may understand each other and ourselves – and Spock – better than we do now.'

The invitation to enter Sarek's mind was never an unwelcome one – she felt that she was entering an undiscovered but wonderful country every time she did. She drew up a chair beside him, turned to him, and as he placed his fingertips on her face she opened her mind to his thoughts.

. . . . . .

The Vulcan sun was a balm on Spock's head and shoulders, beating down from almost directly overhead as he walked towards ShiKahr along the sand-scudded road. The burning spire of anger that had flared in his core at Sarek's words was dwindling away. In a way, he was grateful for what had provoked such anger. Just as much as his mother's words had allowed him to see his relationship with Jim more clearly, so had Sarek's ill-considered question. No, his attackers had not been aware of their relationship. No, the method of their attack could in no way have been motivated by that choice. No, his feelings for Jim had nothing to do with what had happened to him.

An image formed before him, hovering in his imagination. He saw the obscured, unpleasant faces of his captors, shaded by dim, artificial light – and then the contrast of Jim, golden and clean and always ready to accept him for what he was. No, there was no connection, no similarity, between Jim and those men. And – he _*needed*_ Jim! That realisation was like a beacon shining from far away, drawing him in, mindless as a moth spiralling in towards a candle. He needed Jim…

He looked up, and almost jumped. _*Jim_* was there, walking along the road towards him, shading his eyes with his hand as if he was trying to see who it was approaching him in the bright Vulcan sunlight.

Had he managed to conjure Jim out of his thoughts?

He dismissed that fanciful idea almost before it came into his consciousness.

'Jim!' he said, unable to conceal the pleased surprise from his voice.

The human reacted with a broad smile as he recognised his partner. Spock's pace quickened momentarily – and then he remembered himself, and slowed back to a sedate, controlled walk.

'Jim, I believed you to be at least eight hours away still,' Spock said, this time keeping the wonder out of his voice.

'I know – but I crossed paths with the _Eldorado,_ en route to Vulcan at warp seven,' Kirk explained quickly as he reached him. 'I hitched a lift in their shuttle bay.'

He was smiling broadly, filled with nothing but joy at his unexpectedly early meeting with Spock, forgetting the oppressive heat and the thin air and the alien surroundings and seeing nothing but _*Spock,_* standing on this road and welcoming him after all that had happened.

Spock nodded, taking another step closer, his pace more tentative now he had closed the distance between himself and his captain. Despite Jim's happiness and Spock's willingness to interact with him they both seemed uncertain of quite where the boundaries lay.

'I am glad,' Spock said finally. Then he glanced back towards his parents' house, his expression changing.

'Are you sure, Spock?' Jim asked in concern, following his gaze.

Spock's eyes lingered on the house a moment longer, then he turned back.

'I had not previously told my parents about our relationship. I have just done so. It seemed wise, before you arrived.'

'That good, eh?' Kirk asked, an unusual nervousness entering his voice.

'My mother is quite sanguine,' Spock began, and then trailed off.

Jim took another step forward, sensing that this was the right time to catch hold of Spock's hand. Their fingers touched, and a jolt of sensation ricocheted through both their bodies as Spock's sensitive fingers reacted and his mind projected his instinctive pleasure to Jim. His lips parted briefly, his mind clouding with nothing but physical delight. After a split second he controlled the reaction, relief coming in its wake that he had been able to experience such an intimate touch without any sense of anxiety or revulsion.

'Your father,' Kirk said, trying hastily to cover his own arousal in case it disturbed Spock.

Spock shook his head, keeping his grasp on Jim's hand as Kirk made to withdraw.

'Is more conventional,' he said simply, choosing not to expand on that statement.

'He'll come round,' Jim said.

He understood enough about Spock's father to know that Sarek _*would_* be difficult – but also that he probably would finally accept what was, after all, a logical relationship. He stood silent for a moment, simply looking at Spock and taking in the set of his face. It was obvious to someone as familiar with the Vulcan as he was that he was preoccupied – but beneath that there was a level of relaxation that he had not seen in him since his rescue from the Oakdale facility.

'We could find a room in a hotel,' he suggested, but Spock instantly shook his head.

'It would be considered quite unconventional for the son of a household to pay for accommodation when his family home is open to him,' he said. 'It would only draw attention, and Sarek – '

'Wouldn't approve,' Kirk said with a wry smile. 'Well in that case, he'll just have to come round sooner rather than later.'

Spock exhaled, and nodded. 'He will,' he said, the clarity of distance helping to give him perspective on his father's reaction. 'Sarek was – surprised – but I am almost certain that he will be accepting. I – was perhaps hasty in my interpretation of some things that he said.'

Jim smiled, and was rewarded by a warm look of welcome in Spock's eyes. Something had changed since they had been together on the ship. That much was very obvious.

'I've missed you, Spock,' Jim said, touching a hand to the Vulcan's face.

'I have not been on Vulcan so long,' Spock pointed out, but he leant ever so slightly in to the touch instead of drawing away.

'No,' Kirk nodded. 'But you've been away for longer than that.'

Spock almost smiled.

'I understand,' he said.

He could feel the tenuous connection between his and Jim's minds, still uncertain, but stronger than it had been in months. It was like glimpsing the beginning of a familiar path, knowing that weeds had grown up through a long absence, but that it would only take a few journeys to wear the path back to its familiar, well-trodden softness.

'This Healer's been doing his job?' Kirk asked, closing his hand more firmly on Spock's and feeling his reactions in his mind as much as seeing them in his body.

'He has been assisting me in identifying my areas of discord and suggesting ways of resolving that discord,' Spock said with a degree of awkwardness – then added, 'It is not usual to speak about the consultation between Healer and patient, even with one's partner.'

'But – you're getting there?' Jim asked in a low voice. 'You _*are_* getting there, aren't you? I can feel it in you?'

Spock nodded gravely. 'Yes, Jim. I am finding myself again, and – I am ready to let you assist me in the search.'

'Spock,' Jim said in a low voice, drawing closer still.

He reached a hand up to the back of the Vulcan's neck, heedless of the public space they were in. There were no pedestrians and no traffic on this sand-blown road – no one to watch and pass judgement. He drew Spock forward, and the Vulcan did not resist, allowing Jim to kiss him in the most human of ways.

Another barrier seemed to dissolve in his mind as their lips touched, human-cool on Vulcan-warmth… After what seemed like a very long time he finally drew away, satiated. Taking his captain's hand, and quite content with the action, he turned towards home.

(The End ;-) I know people have suggested they want/expect more – but it can be in your imagination ;-))


End file.
